In the wake of Wentworth, academic culture wars

One way to deal with a devastating byelection defeat in a formerly safe seat is to pause and reflect on events leading up to said defeat, with a view to understanding what went wrong and avoiding doing the same thing again—perhaps even learning something from the process and enjoying something in the way of personal growth and deeper insight. The Liberal way, as seems to be their habit, involves something markedly different.

In this instance however, they lack refugees, immigrants, terrorists, unionists, the unemployed, feminists or any other demonised sector of the population with whom to menace the public and generate a wave of political reaction that might be ridden to happier pastures for themselves and few besides. We find then the culture wars being once more rolled out to wedge public opinion, the Coalition’s humping of old culture war tropes not unlike the humping of the American Dream by Hunter S. Thompson’s early morning gamblers in his classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

In this latest case, this appears to take the form of attacks on academic freedom following revelations in the Senate estimate committee that former coalition education minister Simon Birmingham (now trade minister) blocked 11 academic grants from the Australian Research Council for research in the humanities, worth a total of $4 million. In response to an uproar led by university deans, associations like the Group of Eight and academic bodies like the Australian Academy of the Humanities, Birmingham (now trade minister), responded by tweeting that:

I‘m pretty sure most Australian taxpayers preferred their funding to be used for research other than spending $223,000 on projects like “Post orientalist arts of the Strait of Gibraltar.”

Following this, incoming education minister Dan Tehan jumped into the fray, declaring that the coalition would implement a ‘national interest test’ to, in his words, ‘improve the public’s confidence’ in academic funding. What Tehan neglected to mention in doing so however was that the funding process already featured a component requiring applicants to demonstrate how their research would benefit the national polis. That this fact was ignored at the outset, along with the fact that the coalition rescinded a measure introduced by Labor that funding vetos had to be made public, indicated something of the virtue signalling nature of the exercise.

This did not however prevent Tehan from taking the opportunity to try to claw back ground lost in Wentworth by alleging that ‘Labor believes the government should just sign blank cheques because they don’t care about spending other people’s money.’ To this he added that, ‘We believe a good government respects hard working taxpayers by doing due diligence about how their money is spent,’ again not something in the main that the voters of Wentworth had seemed particularly convinced about.

As a reversion to culture war, however, neither the facts surrounding the distribution of funding, nor the reality that a minister in a newly minority government was trying to stake a claim to having a monopoly over insight into what constitutes the national interest, had any bearing on Tehan’s comments. On the contrary, the political nature of the proposal to introduce a ‘national interest’ test represented, not a concern for academic impartiality, but rather an ideological appeal to ingrained prejudice against pointy-headed liberal elites out of touch with a working class allegedly enamoured of the conservative values favoured by corporate elites, the tyranny of political correctness, and other such far-right scare tropes.

Tehan’s reference of the enormous tax burden placed by Australian governments on Australian workers was no less encumbered by ideological jaundice and the desire to shift attention away from the shortcomings that cost it the Wentworth by-election, which neither Tehan nor anyone else appears interested in reflecting on. Such lack of interest belied Tehan’s culture-war claim that ‘I make no apologies for ensuring that taxpayer research dollars weren’t spent on projects that Australians would rightly view as being entirely the wrong priorities’—the pretence that the government had a premium on insight into the national interest again at odds with the fact that it had just lost a formerly safe seat and is now a minority government.

The lack of concern for facts as a facet of its ongoing culture war suggests then that Coalition usage of the concept of the ‘national interest’ has an entirely different meaning. It is apparent that its claims regarding academic funding have a virtue signalling function, to recast the Coalition as the party of conscience and restraint in the aftermath of the leadership spill against Malcolm Turnbull. In addition to this, it has a culture war function in identifying the national interest with the interests traditionally serviced by the Tories—those it was most reluctant to cross, for example, in launching the Royal Commission into the banking and finance sector, with all the scandal that ensued.

These scandals speak in fact to the habitual tendency of the Coalition in particular to identify the interests of the proverbial One Percent with the national interest, particularly insofar as its embrace of neoliberalism and market deregulation have precipitated the excesses and corruption now exposed. The construction of shipping ports on the Great Barrier Reef and the green-lighting of the Adani coal mine are indicative of others. Corporate tax cuts amidst stagnating wages, increasingly unaffordable housing and ever-expanding income inequality invite comparisons of governments to ‘wholly-owned subsidiaries’ of their corporate campaign donors; indeed, the former PM was himself a previously on the payroll at investment bank Goldman Sachs. The interventions are becoming a little more direct these days. International comparisons are too obvious to even merit naming.

It is this tendency, the drive to identify the national interest with the particular interests of the very richest of the rich, that makes the reversion by the Coalition to culture war in this instance of particular interest. US writer Naomi Klein has described neoliberal ideology as a form of corporate supremacism; the drive to associate responsible academic funding with the interests of transnational corporations by conflating theirs with the national interests carries echoes of absolutist tendencies evident in such things as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)—a ‘free trade’ agreement that provides for dismantling of national regulations by unaccountable courts if they are felt to infringe the sacred principle.

If culture war serves this economically absolutist or corporate supremacist thrust, then one might conclude that the minority parliamentary subsidiaries of transnational corporations who claim a keener insight into the national interest than the majority of Australians or the mandated processes followed by the Australian Research Council are in fact threatened by academic freedom. The likelihood that they are tends towards the conclusion that what Simon Birmingham, Dan Tehan and other culture warriors of the neoliberal far right fears about universities is precisely what has ceased to be true about themselves—namely, that they are responsive to the needs and interests of the mass of the population. In this, they arguably reflect ideological tendencies on the far-right far more generally,

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Ben Debney is a doctoral candidate in International Relations at Deakin University, Burwood. He is theorising a model of panic-driven scapegoating. Web: bendebney.info