Research and community: the academy and the state

A few days before the national election that swept the Australian Labor Party (ALP) from office in September 2013, the conservative opposition parties (known as the ‘coalition’ because of the Liberal and National Party collaboration agreement) announced that one of their first acts would be to transfer funding from the humanities and social sciences research to ‘the hard sciences and medicine’ (Briggs, 2013). They proposed that taxpayers should only support useful research, such as treating diabetes. Philosophy, social anthropology, and a raft of other already poorly supported fields would, in future, it was implied, find their funding cut even further. The coalition pledged that climate change, a particular hate-object, would be removed from the list of national research priorities should it win office.

The Australian newspaper (a News Ltd broadsheet that had thrown its weight behind Rupert Murdoch's crusade to end the Labor government) Higher Education section then sought comment, a baited hook to which this author rose (Lane, 2013). I pointed to the contradiction between the incoming government's declaration of support for freedom of speech no matter how offensive, and its desire to constrain what research could be published from grants it would fund. In response, a raft of comments pilloried the social sciences, demanding that taxpayer-supported academics should be shunted off into the real world to make a living. Such antagonism to the social science research community is not new: the first signs of conservative containment of unpopular or confronting social science research outcomes dates back to another change of government in 1976, where a leading sociologist, Jean Martin, had her work on Vietnamese refugees defunded by the incoming Fraser coalition government (Shaver, 2014; see also Encel, 1981).

The return of the Hawke ALP government in 1983 redirected public attention once more towards the potential value of social science research in the creation and evaluation of public policy, although not necessarily in positive ways. The ALP commissioned a review, and then closed down the Australian Institute for Multicultural Affairs (AIMA) (Council of the AIMA, 1983, 1986, pp 7-13, 28-9), a Fraser-era institution under the direction of Petro Georgiou, just previously senior advisor to the Prime Minister, and later to be a Liberal MP.