‘It’s taken six months and $100,000 in legal costs to clear my name’

Her research into late-term abortions provoked controversy. It provoked complaints even though it was perfectly scholarly. Her university's response to the complaints was a series of oppressive "investigations" which eventually attempted to penalize her

In 1964, Robert Menzies gave a speech at the University of NSW defending academic freedom and the pursuit of truth in all areas of human endeavour as a fundamental principle for Australian universities.

“It is of the most vital importance for human progress in all fields of knowledge that the highest encouragement should be given to untrammelled research, to the vigorous pursuit of truth, however unorthodox it may seem,” the prime minister said.

Law professor Joanna Howe is claiming a modern-day victory for this ideal after securing a breakthrough in the Fair Work Commission case she brought against her employer, the University of Adelaide.

Howe argues she has secured a win for academic freedom at a key moment for Australian universities given a new age of political polarisation, campus cancel culture and an elevated focus on the protection of students from content they may find offensive.

In June, she lodged a stop bullying application against the university with the industrial umpire and sought the removal of the corrective actions imposed on her. But this was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Across a period of 4½ years, Howe endured six investigations conducted by the university as a result of complaints made against her research into the politically contentious topic of abortion.

While Howe was cleared by all of the investigations, the sixth to be conducted by the university required her to complete a research integrity course within 30 days. The aim was to provide further education on how not to do biased research.

This corrective action was imposed on Howe despite the investigation dismissing allegations of plagiarism and misrepresentation of facts in a submission she made to a parliamentary inquiry in South Australia. The investigation found there was no breach of the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research. Howe fought against the requirement to complete the online re-education course, but the battle took a heavy personal and financial took.

After first being notified of the complaint against her on January 24, Howe spent more than half a year dealing with and responding to the investigation process. She racked up legal costs of nearly $100,000 in her bid to resolve the dispute.

“I appealed internally on four occasions and was never given any reason for why my appeals were rejected or corrective actions were imposed,” she tells Inquirer. “My appeals raised serious concerns with the university’s failure to follow its own procedures, including the requirement to dismiss complaints that were made vexatiously or in bad faith. Every time my appeals fell on deaf ears.”

An FWC conciliation process now has produced an agreed statement between both parties making clear that the university accepted commissioner Christopher Platt’s recommendation “not to require Professor Howe to comply with the corrective actions and that no further action will be taken in this matter”.

“The parties have agreed on a process regarding the investigation of complaints moving forward,” the statement says.

“The University of Adelaide supports academic freedom, as reflected in its Enterprise Agreement 2023–2025 and its Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom Policy.”

Following the resolution of the dispute, Howe has embarked on a fresh campaign to have a new process for the dismissal of bad-faith complaints adopted more broadly across the nation’s universities. She sees the reform as a key instrument for the defence of academic freedom.

In a letter sent to Universities Australia chairman David Lloyd on Friday, Howe says the “ability to research and speak out in areas that are unpopular or controversial benefits the whole community in our pursuit of truth”.

“While I accept that complaints are par for the course if one is researching in an area of controversy, what I do not accept is the choice by universities to investigate complaints that are made vexatiously or in bad faith,” she says.

“This choice, as I know all too well, places researchers under an unfair and unreasonable spotlight and distracts them from pursuing their research.”

Howe’s research has subjected her not only to criticism of her work but also personal attack across several years – including the release by activists of her place of work and family.

Since 2017, Howe has researched abortion in Australia including its different methods, the regulation and incidence of sex-selective abortion, the regulation and incidence of abortion after viability – known as late-term abortion – and the regulation and incidence of babies born alive after an abortion.

In 2021, she began research on the regulation of prostitution, including an examination of the merits of full decriminalisation of prostitution versus a partial decriminalisation model.

Howe’s primary field of research, however, has been at the intersection of labour law and migration law and in this field she is regarded as one of the nation’s leading experts. She holds a doctorate of philosophy in law from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes scholar, and is the author and co-editor of three books.

In 2022 she was hand-picked by the Labor government to help lead the migration review headed by former top public servant Martin Parkinson that was delivered in March last year.

In her letter to Lloyd, Howe has made the following proposal: “I am requesting that Universities Australia work with the sector to introduce a new, specific requirement to mandatorily dismiss complaints which are made vexatiously or in bad faith about the research or conduct of academics.

“This simple yet significant reform would help free scholars who research in areas of controversy from the threat of being under constant scrutiny and investigation.”

Howe tells Inquirer the outcome at the conciliation in the FWC was “a significant victory for academic freedom but it’s a fight I never should have had to take on”.

“No one should have to go through what I have been through just to fight for the freedom to research and speak,” she says. “It should not have taken me six months … and nearly $100,000 in legal costs to clear my name.

“This outcome at conciliation confirms I was right to not submit to the university’s attempt at re-education by forcing me to do an anti-bias course.”

The complaints

Between November 25, 2019, and May 2 this year, the University of Adelaide undertook six investigations into Howe’s scholarship because of complaints – five of which were made within an 18-month period from July 2022. The wave of complaints from July 2022 came after Howe started to promote her research online, including on her website and on social media, to make it more accessible to a general audience.

Howe says this exposed her to harassment, verbal abuse and repeated threats to her employment. She was targeted in particular by individuals and activists from pro-sex work and pro-abortion organisations.

This resulted in several complaints from TikTok activists who accused Howe of misrepresenting facts for saying that abortion was legal in Australia up to birth and that the procedure was not limited only to life-threatening situations or where there was the prospect of serious congenital abnormality.

Howe has researched, collected and promoted data on the incidence of late-term abortions including those conducted for psychosocial reasons or in ins­tances where healthy babies had medical abnormalities that could have been medically or surgically corrected.

“Having been subject to five investigations in two years because of the controversial nature of my research has substantially impacted and undermined my academic freedom to research and advocate on abortion from a critical perspective,” she tells Inquirer.

The sixth complaint

The sixth investigation related to a submission Howe made to a parliamentary inquiry in South Australia. The complaint was made by a TikTok and Instagram activist, whom The Australian has not named, over allegations of plagiarism and misrepresentation in Howe’s submission.

Howe has strongly criticised the university’s handling of this complaint. She argues it made several errors that denied her procedural fairness.

First, while being notified in a January 24 letter from the university that a sixth investigation was being conducted into her, the letter did not identify the specific allegations being made against Howe’s research.

Howe was unable to provide responses to the allegations until February 14, after she had inquired a second time to discover their substance.

Second, the university’s preliminary assessment concluded in March that there was no breach of the Australian Code of Conduct for Responsible Research. But it did find there was a “minor departure from accepted academic practice in terms of appropriate citation and representation of primary sources”.

The assessment officer did not recommend any corrective action but, despite this, the university’s formal determination was for Howe to complete an online research integrity course within 30 days – a requirement imposed on her on May 2.

Third, the individual who made the complaint against Howe was notified by the University of Adelaide of its determination that the “complaint be resolved at the local level with corrective actions”.

The university neglected to mention that the allegations of plagiarism and misrepresentation had not been substantiated or that Howe was not in breach of the Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research.

“The university’s correspondence with the TikTok activist who made the original complaint in the fifth investigation was appalling,” Howe tells Inquirer. “It did not state that the investigation found I had not breached the Australian Code of Conduct for Responsible Research but stated that corrective actions had been imposed, which led to the complainant publicly releasing this letter.

“This led to a torrent of online abuse as pro-abortion trolls and activists harassed me and erroneously claimed that I had been found guilty of misconduct and that the university had ordered me to unpublish my research report.

“Neither had happened and yet the university refused to clear my name.”

Fourth, Howe appealed on four occasions within the university against its handling of the matter.

“My appeals raised serious concerns with the university’s failure to follow its own procedures, including the requirement to dismiss complaints that were made vexatiously or in bad faith,” she says.

“I raised concerns around a serious conflict of interest with respect to the responsible designated officer for my case.”

Howe has argued that the university failed to comply with its policy on academic freedom and that pro-abortion scholarship by others at the university was not held to the same standard. She says pro-abortion scholars also had diverted from best practice when citing primary sources on several occasions but had faced no consequences.

A new pathway

In a bid to ensure that important research at Australian universities is not stymied because of a stream of bad-faith complaints targeting individual academics, Howe is now urging Universities Australia to implement broader reforms to uphold academic freedom.

In her letter to Lloyd, obtained by Inquirer, Howe argues that universities should apply a common standard allowing them to “automatically” dismiss bad-faith or vexatious complaints.

This would include adopting common definitions of vexatious and bad faith.

Howe suggests definitions for both and says universities should bear several factors in mind when assessing whether the complaints meet those definitions.

She says universities should consider the reality of “differing views in relation to controversial research topics” and “whether the complaint has been brought with an ulterior motive and not in good faith by reason of these different views”.

In addition, universities should consider the need to uphold the “right of scholars to academic freedom, freedom of speech and health and safety”.

However, she also says the “designation of a complaint as being made vexatiously or in bad faith” should not be taken at the discretion of university management.

Howe says there is a growing urgency to the reform blueprint.

“This requirement to automatically dismiss complaints that are found to be vexatious or in bad faith is necessary given the central importance of academic freedom, recognised by the High Court in Peter Ridd v James Cook University and in the French Review of Freedom of Speech in Australian Higher Education Providers,” Howe says.

“I urge Universities Australia to consider this modest proposal to ensure better protection of academ­ic freedom and free speech across the higher education sector.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/its-taken-six-months-and-100000-in-legal-costs-to-clear-my-name/news-story/7bde4e2daa5c87b91a6fd8704eca2b1b

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Childcare pay rises won’t help nation’s families one jot

Albanese has little resistance to special pleading from vested interests such as the United Workers Union, whose campaign for better pay for childcare workers has secured a $3.6bn commitment from his government.

Won’t that be inflationary? Peter Stefanovic asked when Albanese appeared on Sky News to spruik the deal. “No,” he replied. “Because what it will do is keep costs down, importantly.” Stefanovic persisted, citing Reserve Bank governor Michele Bullock’s concern that government spending is feeding inflation. “Yeah, that’s very different,” Albanese replied.

It turned out not to be very different after all. Break open one bread roll and before you know it everyone wants a slice. Albanese’s generosity to childcare workers prompted a demand for a similar deal from the Australian Services Union on behalf of 300,000 disability workers.

This is how inflationary wage spirals start and why decisions on public service wages are best left to tribunals, rather than stitched up in piecemeal deals between Labor prime ministers and unions.

Setting aside the questionable proposition that governments can stop the march of inflation by throwing money in its path, the ever-growing government spending on childcare raises far more important family policy questions that few are game to ask.

Is it sensible, for instance, to skew assistance in favour of working couples and away from single-income families? Is it fair that working couples with one child in care received an average subsidy of $8181 last year while the 30 per cent of mothers or fathers who chose to stay at home received nothing?

The growth in federal government spending on childcare took off under Julia Gillard’s government, driven by an enticing narrative about breaking glass ceilings buttressed with the superficially respectable economic argument that greater workforce participation boosted productivity and economic growth.

It does not. That’s because outsourcing household responsibilities does not create fresh economic activity. It simply brings it on to the books.

The most contentious argument in favour of professional childcare was that it was in the best interests of the child. Albanese persisted with this flawed line of reasoning in his round of radio and television interviews at the end of last week.

“Of course it’s good for kids,” he told Triple M Perth. “Ninety per cent of human brain development occurs in the first five years.”

Many experts in early childhood development would draw the opposite conclusion based on the salient fact that time spent building a stable, bonded relationship with their children is the best investment in a child’s future that parents can make.

In her 2017 book, Being There, US psychoanalyst Erica Komisar assembles a convincing body of evidence to show that excessively long periods spent in an institutional setting is, to put it mildly, a subprime option.

Yet childcare is more than just childminding, Albanese told listeners to 6PR on Friday. He cited the evidence of his own eyes, gathered during a fleeting visit to a childcare centre in the Perth suburb of Dayton. “There they were learning about the letter ‘L’ and the letter ‘U’, with a whole lot of little blocks about how to do that,” Albanese said.

The idea that preschool children must be institutionalised to learn the alphabet is an insult to generations of conscientious parents. An Australian Institute of Health and Welfare survey in 2017 found 79 per cent of children aged 0 to two years had been read or told stories by a parent on three or more days in the previous week, while 44 per cent of them had libraries of between 25 and 100 children’s books in their home.

Institutional early learning can accelerate the development of children from bookless backgrounds with inattentive parents, but children from low socio-economic groups and non-English-speaking homes are less likely to be at childcare centres, which draw their clients disproportionably from English-speaking, educated, professional homes.

The result of increased federal government funding has been a substantial migration of children from so-called informal care, most commonly grandparents, to professional care. While informal care halved between 1999 and 2017, professional care increased by around 70 per cent. Transferring familial obligations to the state and robbing children of the benefits of forming bonds with their grandparents is the unintended consequence of government interference in the market.

Sadly, a Labor government is probably incapable of fixing this expensive policy mess, just as it is incapable of fixing the National Disability Insurance Scheme where costs will blow out even further when the government caves in to the latest pay demand. It will fall to the next Coalition government to restore sanity to family policy. It will be a delicate conversation. Nothing will be gained by making parents feel more uncomfortable about the conflict between their twin responsibilities as parents and breadwinners.

Childcare centres provide an invaluable service and must be supported by government since an under-resourced, unregulated sector would be far worse. The dedication of childcare professionals must be encouraged and rewarded since, like good teachers, they are the hope of the side.

The Coalition might start by revisiting the intention behind Family Tax Benefit Part B, John Howard’s solution to the challenge of assisting parents without discriminating against those who chose not to work. It might seek to balance the level of subsidies with out-of-pocket costs for parents to ensure full-time parents were no worse off. It might consider family-friendly reforms to the tax system, including incentives to increase the birthrate. Australia is not the only country that has tried to kick this can down the road by encouraging migration. Yet, as we are beginning to learn, there are undesirable consequences to that approach – even in a well-adjusted country such as Australia.

Reforming family policy, with its entrenched subsidies and vested commercial interests, will be among the most difficult challenges faced by an incoming Coalition government. It will require the investment of substantial political capital. Yet for a party focused on the long-term interests of Australia, as a nation of well-balanced individuals living where possible in stable family units, there is surely nothing more important.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/childcare-pay-rises-wont-help-nations-families-one-jot/news-story/46bab8c523c9f5a63a96fb20db30e34e

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Disturbing societal trends raising the risk of a terror attack

The disruptive role of the Greens in this process is very much in keeping with the Trotskyite attitudes and history of their leader, Adam Bandt

ASIO director-general Mike Burgess did more this week than raise the level of Australia’s terror threat. He redefined our security challenge to recognise an increasingly intolerant and divided country.

Burgess has been forced to broaden ASIO’s traditional focus to respond to a host of new and disturbing trends that, taken together, have undermined social cohesion and increasingly have normalised violence as a part of protest and public debate.

While some of ASIO’s grim assessment reflects the manifestation in Australia of violent trends in the US and Britain, it also has been influenced heavily by the extraordinary fire and fury ignited at home by the war in Gaza.

Burgess was adamant this week that his decision to raise Australia’s terror threat level from “possible” to “probable” was “not a direct response” to the local fallout from the turmoil in the Middle East. But in the same breath he made a powerful case as to why the heated local response to that conflict is the most “important”, “relevant” and “significant driver” of the country’s “degrading security environment”.

“The conflict has fuelled grievances, promoted protest, exacerbated division, undermined social cohesion and elevated intolerance,” Burgess says.

His comments have led each of the major political parties to point the finger at each other for their part in this outcome.

Anthony Albanese slammed the Greens for fuelling community divisions over Gaza while Peter Dutton said the government should share the blame for failing to tackle anti-Semitism decisively since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 last year.

Meanwhile, the Greens, who have refused to strongly condemn Hamas, anti-Semitism or the defacing of MPs’ office by anti-Israel activists, accused the government of politicising the issue, claiming their supporters were only “pushing for peace”.

ASIO’s assessment of this new volatile mood is stark, with Burgess declaring “politically motivated violence now joins espionage and foreign interference as our principal security concerns”.

But the critical part of his assessment is that this risk of politically motivated violence is no longer caused by a singular terror driver, such as the rise of Islamic State in 2012.

Instead it is now likely to flow from a range of growing social ills, including a spike in political polarisation and intolerance, violent protests and debate, anti-authoritarian beliefs in part fuelled by excessive Covid lockdowns, conspiracy theories, distrust of institutions and a normalisation of provocative and inflammatory behaviours. What’s more, many are combining these beliefs into what ASIO calls “new hybrid ideologies”, all amplified by the internet and social media, which remains the primary platform for radicalisation. Hard-to-detect lone wolf attacks with a gun or a knife are the likely method of attack, rather than old-style terror cell plots to blow up major landmarks or cause mass casualties.

The relevance of the Gaza conflict to ASIO’s assessment is not that it has created these dangerous trends but, rather, it has helped to fuel them.

The storming of the US Capitol building on January 6, 2021, on the basis of Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” about the 2020 election result was the first major global illustration of the emerging social trends Burgess talks about. These volatile social and political trends have continued to evolve in the US and are reflected in the savage and inflammatory language used by both presidential candidates, Trump and Kamala Harris, on the campaign trail. No one knows precisely why shooter Thomas Crooks chose to try to assassinate Trump last month, but the act was an illustration of the darker, more intolerant times ASIO speaks of.

Meanwhile Britain has been deeply shaken this week by violent anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim riots fuelled by online misinformation and extremist views following a deadly knife attack on children in Southport.

In Australia, ASIO says it has disrupted eight potential terror attacks in the past four months, all involving radicalised youths between the ages of 14 and 21.

This included the stabbing of an Assyrian Orthodox bishop in western Sydney in April by a 16-year-old who was interacting with extremists online. The boy was a part of an online group of fellow extremist youths called Brotherhood, and he used a smiling portrait of Osama bin Laden as his WhatsApp profile picture.

What ASIO fears most is that these dangerous new factors are being turbocharged by the divisions caused in Australia by the conflict in Gaza.

“We’ve been seeing all of the trends that Burgess spoke about in his address for quite some time now, they pre-dated Covid and were certainly accelerated during Covid,” says Lydia Khalil, director of transnational challenges at the Lowy Institute. “The Gaza conflict is similar, it is a contentious societal and political issue contributing to the legitimisation and the normalisation of the use of violence to achieve political ends.”

The Hamas massacre of Israelis on October 7 last year triggered the first ugly manifestation of this in Australia when a flag-burning mob celebrated the Hamas killings and chanted anti-Semitic slogans outside the Sydney Opera House.

Since then there has been a record spike in anti-Semitic attacks across the country, including bashings and verbal abuse of Jews, online harassment, the forced closure of Jewish businesses, the targeting of Jewish performers in the arts and Jewish students on campus during the university encampments.

The pro-Palestinian movement in Australia since October 7 has expressed legitimate concerns about the high civilian death toll during Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza. But the activist rump of this movement has gone much further than legitimate protest and has embraced exactly the sort of “provocative, inflammatory, intolerant, unpeaceful and uncivil” behaviour that Burgess warned of when he raised the terror threat level.

These pro-Palestinian activists have proved to be anti-Israel activists above all by failing to distinguish between Israeli politics and the Australian Jewish community. They repeatedly have encouraged chants advocating the eradication of Israel and the carrying of blatantly anti-Semitic signs and slogans.

The sort of politically motivated violence Burgess has warned about erupted in Melbourne’s Jewish heartland of Caulfield late last year when pro-Palestinian protesters were arrested for charging at Jewish counter-protesters during a provocative rally outside a synagogue.

Shortly afterwards, pro-Palestinian activists confronted Israeli family members who had lost their loved ones in the October 7 massacre, storming into the Melbourne hotel where they were staying and placing dolls covered in fake blood on the floor.

This ugly activism is driven by what intelligence agencies describe as a “self-righteousness” about the pro-Palestinian cause that blinds these protesters to the normal standards of protest behaviour. Hence, we have seen acts such as the bizarre and offensive defacing of Australian war memorials with pro-Palestinian slogans when these memorials have no relevance to the current conflict in the Middle East.

More ominously for ASIO is the movement’s support for the vandalisation and defacing of the electorate offices of more than a dozen federal MPs and ministers, some of whom can no longer work from those taxpayer-funded workplaces.

In June pro-Palestinian activists set fire to the electorate office of Melbourne Jewish MP Josh Burns and painted horns on his image in a poster. ASIO would have noted Burns’s response when he said: “I’m nervous about someone getting hurt or worse. How is this a peaceful act? It didn’t bring about peace in the Middle East. If it did, I would have vandalised my own office.”

The government shares part of the responsibility for the rise of this out-of-control racist activism because from October 7 it has failed to call out anti-Semitism as strongly as it should have, fearing an electoral backlash from Muslim voters in its western Sydney electorates.

But it is the Greens who have done more than any other political group in the country to fuel this increasingly violent protest movement and undermine the country’s social cohesion that Burgess has warned about.

The Greens have refused to call out the excesses of pro-Palestinian activists including the defacing of war memorials, where Greens leader Adam Bandt glibly dismissed the issue, saying the Prime Minister and the Opposition Leader “were more agitated about graffiti than they have been about the slaughter of people in Gaza”.

Greens deputy leader Mehreen Faruqi has even refused to say whether the listed terror group Hamas should be dismantled.

Former ASIO chief Dennis Richardson says political leaders need to avoid any actions that can lead others down a pathway to violence. But he also says those most likely to carry out acts of terrorists or politically motivated violence don’t usually take their leads from politicians.

“It’s always a bit difficult in a liberal democracy because part of the liberal democracy is robust public debate, and part of that robust public debate is politicians having a go at one another. But I don’t think it’s appropriate for politicians to be encouraging those who would seek to essentially blockade electoral offices,” Richardson says, without naming the Greens. “That strikes me as being fundamentally anti- democratic.

“And if you’re going to encourage people to do something like that, you do run the risk of perhaps even unintentionally creating a framework in which it’s easier for people to rationalise what other things they may want to do. So you’ve certainly got to watch that.

“But, equally, I doubt whether too many of those who do engage in politically motivated violence get their lead from politicians.”

Richardson says the key question for ASIO is whether the local passions inflamed by the Gaza conflict could spill over into a deadly act.

“I think (Burgess) was in part saying, ‘Look, there are people out here who at the best of times are borderline, and developments such as we see in Gaza can amplify in their own minds and make it more likely that they might do something.”

For example, Richardson says Australia “would be a much better place if no one in the country had any sympathy for a terrorist organisation like Hamas”.

However, he says among those who do have some sympathy for Hamas in Australia, there’s “a whole spectrum of views”.

“These could range from just being sympathetic to Hamas, through to actually being prepared to do an act that might put people’s lives in jeopardy and actually kill people,” he says.

“The great challenge for ASIO and law enforcement is to monitor a whole range of people who exist right along that spectrum and try to identify those who might actually take that fatal step. And that’s a pretty tough challenge for any organisation.”

The Lowy Institute’s Khalil agrees that this new and broader range of potential security threats identified by ASIO makes the agency’s job of protecting Australians more difficult.

“There are manifestations of political violence now in our society, or concerns around them, that go beyond terrorism,” she says. “It’s becoming an increasingly blurry line between what is legitimate in a democratic society and what should be proscribed, and that is one of the things that makes responses a bit more difficult, because it’s not like it was in the past, where you had these discrete organised groups which would try to conduct various plots and attacks. Now it’s very muddy.”

Khalil says there are now numerous triggers for the type of grievance extremism that Burgess refers to.

“A lot of people are frustrated with the way that democracy is working and they’re increasingly believing that it doesn’t meet the needs of the average person, that it’s really focused on elite interests,” she says. Perceptions of growing inequality and cost of living have led to frustration with governments, fuelling anti-authoritarian views and a wariness of institutions.

“I think it’s not just an issue for ASIO, they’re just one part of the broader spectrum of the response,” Khalil says. “This isn’t just a security issue. So while ASIO will deal with the pointy end of it, where people are radicalised to violence based on whatever mix of grievances they have, that is just one end of this issue. The rest of it is really a broader societal issue.”

Burgess is at pains to say this new range of potential threats is “significant but not insurmountable” and that a terror threat level of probable does not mean inevitable.

But his conclusions are a wakeup call to the real-life consequences of the country’s drift towards intolerance, violent political rhetoric and crumbling political and social civility.

“Like you, I still think we live in a paradise and I think we are the lucky country,” he told Sky News. “But this is stretching us and testing us.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/disturbing-societal-trends-raising-the-risk-of-a-terror-attack/news-story/698e0e0204e8f0aa5c23769ef4594bee

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About 800 University of Sydney students vote to support ‘one Palestinian state’

Nazis

Almost 800 Sydney University students have voted for their student body to support “one Palestinian state” and affirmed “the right of Palestinians to armed resistance” at a rare student general meeting, as the uni seeks police advice on the legality of material used to promote the event.

Students overflowed into four lecture theatres on Wednesday night, voting against an amendment to “condemn Hamas” almost unanimously.

The pro-Palestine Student Representative Council will now “endorse the call for a single, secular democratic state across all of historic Palestine and affirms the right of Palestinians to armed resistance as an occupied people under international law”, after the motion by activist group Students Against War passed at the meeting with only a few votes against it.

Ahead of the SGM, SAW circulated pamphlets on campus with the Hamas triangle symbol on it, and their motion defended the views of a student expelled by Australian National University for saying Hamas deserved “unconditional support”.

Following the meeting, the University said it does “not tolerate any pro-terrorist statements or commentary, including support for Hamas - and any demonstration of support will result in disciplinary action and other possible legal consequences.”

“The University is investigating reports of inappropriate conduct at the meeting, and has sought police advice on the legality of certain material used to promote the event,” a spokesperson said.

The motion by SAW said to “win” the campaign for Palestine at Sydney University, student activists “must commit themselves to building a mass, militant student movement on campus” that “affirms the right of Palestinians to armed resistance, and backs the call for a single, democratic, secular state from the river to the sea”.

After hearing from two affirmative speakers, students elected to go to the vote without further debate due to a lack of time.

A separate motion by pro-Palestine encampment group Students for Palestine USYD repeated demands made throughout the student protests for the university to cut ties with Thales and weapons companies, and Israeli academic institutions, and divest from financial investment in the Jewish state.

An amendment raised to “condemn Hamas” was voted down.

Only two speakers in opposition were given the stage.

“We have just witnessed is this room voting against an amendment condemning a registered terrorist organisation and one of the worst attacks on Jews since the Holocaust,” the first speaker, who did not identify himself, said.

In response, a Students Against War representative in the front rows spat towards the speaker.

A second negative speaker, who spoke from the front of the lecture theatre draped in an Israeli flag was called a “Zionist” and told to leave the stage.

Following the event, organisers led students in a march on vice-chancellor Mark Scott’s office, and could be heard chanting “We don’t want your two states, we want all of ‘48”.

Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-CEO Alex Ryvchin told The Australian “this travesty disgraces the university”.

“It raises serious questions about the failure of its administration to stop this open support for terrorism.”

“Jewish students and academics should not be subjected to motions from fellow students effectively supporting the destruction of their national home and calls for Palestinian terrorism which has always targeted both Israel and Jewish targets abroad,” he said.

“The silence of the university leadership is beyond pathetic. It is negligent and a total abrogation of their duties to their staff and students. The fact that the vice-chancellor could not even issue a statement condemning these motions and reassuring the overwhelming majority of students who find this repugnant is astonishing.”

Wentworth MP Allegra Spender said the university administration needed to do more to provide leadership to their students.

“People in our community were horrified by last night’s student motion at Sydney University,” she said.

“Last night’s motion excuses the actions of Hamas and was passed without meaningful debate. No thoughtful person who considers the facts could support such a motion.”

“I urge the university administration to do more to create constructive and respectful conversations on campus. It is their responsibility to provide leadership to their students.”

A University of Sydney spokesperson said the student representative council did not represent majority of the student body.

“Less than one percent of our student population attended the SRC meeting yesterday - student representative and student-led groups are independent of the University and certainly don’t represent our institutional position nor do they represent the majority of our student body,” their spokesperson said.

“Their members are required to abide by our policies and codes of conduct and we don’t hesitate to take action if there has been a breach.”

The Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education) wrote to the SRC president again on Thursday “reminding them of their obligations”.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/about-800-university-of-sydney-students-vote-to-support-one-palestinian-state/news-story/a921538bb1fb044ebb95025f3d9a9566

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