Date created:23 November 2001 Last modified: 23 November 2001 Maintained by: John Quiggin John Quiggin
27 September 2001
As the public service has been contracted and politicised in Australia over recent decades, the task of developing policy ideas has increasingly been left to private institutes or 'thinktanks'. To understand the debate on any policy issue today, the first requirement is to identify the key thinktanks.
In the case of the Howard government's education policy, the tank to watch is the Centre for Independent Studies. The intellectual rationale for the process of marketising and corporatising education and research has been put forward by Andrew Norton, former advisor to education minister Kemp and now a Research Fellow at the CIS, and by 'enterprising' Vice-Chancellors such as Lauchlan Chipman and Steven Schwartz, both of whom are listed by the CIS as academic advisors.
The CIS has a more impressive intellectual pedigree than its main rivals, the web of Melbourne-based organisations emanating from the Western Mining Corporation (HR Nicholls Society, Lavoisier Group, Samuel Griffiths Society and so on). Its founder, Greg Lindsay, is vice-president of the Mont Pelerin Society, the free-market conclave founded by Nobel Laureate FA von Hayek.
Given this lineage, it is unsurprising that the CIS is sceptical about democracy. If liberal, free-market, institutions are the basis of a good society, but the majority of the public cannot be trusted to support them, power must be placed in the hands of a reliable minority. Hayek opposed what he called 'dogmatic democracy' . He suggested denying the vote to government employees and recipients of welfare benefits, as a possible first step towards a system in which voting was restricted to male property-owners over forty. In claiming to support 'real' democracy, while opposing democracy as the term is normally understood , Hayek was at one with the 'people's democracies' he condemned.
In a recent CIS publication, entitled Building Prosperity, CIS Senior Fellow Wolfgang Kasper endorses many of Hayek's proposals for the curtailment of democracy. He canvasses unspecified 'formal qualifications on the active right to elect' and suggests that large classes of citizens should be prohibited from standing for public office. It is a pity that other advocates of the imposition of free-market policies on an unwilling public are not as explicit on this point as Kasper.
It is not surprising to find that a body with the pedigree of the CIS wants to curb democracy. It is more surprising that a nominally liberal body should be opposed to freedom of speech. Of course, everyone is more eager to defend the freedom of their friends than that of their enemies. As Paul Samuelson noted, the Mont Pelerin society was conspicuously silent during the McCarthy era.
The CIS, however, is opposed to freedom of speech in principle as well as practise. The issue has come to the fore in the corporatised universities, which have sought to muzzle academics who have criticised corporate practices (for example at Melbourne University and the Victoria University of Technology) or antagonised influential figures in areas such as health policy (La Trobe University) and the environment (James Cook University). A favored strategy has been the development of 'codes of ethics' which include restrictions on public comment deemed inappropriate by university management.
A CIS piece published in The Australian by Murdoch University Vice-Chancellor Steven Schwartz a few months ago addressed the case of Ted Steele, the academic sacked by Wollongong University for his attacks on grade inflation, now rampant in Australian universities. Schwartz rejected the classical liberal idea that the best remedy for speech that may be regarded as wrong is more speech. Instead he argued that university managers had the right, and duty, to impose their own ethical standards on academics. Schwartz raised such fanciful possibilities as flat-earth geographers and Nazi anthropologists, but carefully avoided discussing the real issues.
Schwartz hastens to reassure us that he is not in favour of indiscriminate suppression of academic speech, but this is scarcely encouraging. With the exception of Trappist monasteries, no-one wants indiscriminate suppression of speech. The whole point of political censorship to suppress speech discriminatingly. Schwartz has said that he is happy to be called dictatorial, as long as he is not described as a poor communicator. As he is surely aware, the first principle of dictatorship is to maximise the output of supportive communication (aka propaganda) while suppressing criticism.
Freedom of speech, in universities, public spaces and elsewhere, is ultimately incompatible with privatisation and unfettered freedom of action for corporations. The CIS has faced this issue squarely, and decided in favour of the corporation.
Professor John Quiggin is a Senior Research Fellow of the Australian Research Council, based at the Australian National University and Queensland University of Technology.Read more articles from John Quiggin's home page
