Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Cabinet Secretary) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Labor will support the Higher Education Support Amendment (Freedom of Speech) Bill 2020. This bill adopts the recommendations from the French review and aligns the current legislation with the French model code to strengthen protections for academic freedom and freedom of speech in Australian universities. This legislation inserts a new definition of 'academic freedom' into the Higher Education Support Act and replaces the existing term 'free intellectual inquiry' in relevant provisions with the allied concepts of 'freedom of speech' and 'academic freedom'. These are reasonable measures.

The Labor Party supports academic freedom. University students and researchers should absolutely be free to follow their intellectual curiosity, to express their opinions and beliefs and to contribute to public debate. All universities have agreed voluntarily to adopt the French model code, and the agreement is now included in their mission based compacts. This should not be a controversial statement. Australia has world-class universities with a reputation for intellectual freedom and academic independence. Gough Whitlam told us:

Academic freedom is the first requirement, the essential property of a free society. More than trade, more than strategic interests, more even than common systems of law or social or political structures, free and flourishing universities provide the true foundation of our western kinship, and define the true commonality of the democratic order.

That is as true today as it was then. The fact is Morrison and the Liberals only like freedom of speech when it suits them. When Senator Birmingham was the minister for education, he alone vetoed more than $4 million of Australian Research Council grants because he didn't like the sound of them, an act universities called reprehensible and which undermined the impartiality of the whole grant process.

Former Chief Justice French himself says in the report:

From the available evidence … claims of a freedom of speech crisis on Australian campuses are not substantiated.

The only reason this bill has been introduced when it has is that this government has done a deal with Pauline Hanson.

Debate interrupted.