What is likely to happen after years and decades in which one side of the political divide has captured the schools and universities? Let’s take what I know best, the law schools. Donations to political parties are public information in the US. We know that Democrat-donating law professors massively outnumber those who give to the Republicans, double digits to one (and that’s law, think about women’s studies, sociology, etc). Surveys of US law professors paint the same picture. A recent Canadian survey found that just 8 per cent of academics vote Conservative, and this in a country where almost half the population votes Conservative. Do you think Australia is any different?

The whole ‘Diversity, Inclusion and Equity’ HR-bloated bureaucracies (not just in universities but throughout the big end of town now) are implementing schemes that conservatives like me detest and that have the effect of significantly lowering viewpoint diversity on campus – the sort of diversity you’d think a university might care about, but trust me does not. For young conservative academics why would you go through the motions of having to pretend females are hard done by in universities (plainly not true) so that the women get fast-tracked and super-sympathetic promotions and successful grants via all sorts of indirect means? Why would you genuflect before the woke Aboriginal orthodoxy that forces endless acknowledgements of country (for some, to start every class) which to many, like me, seem patronising, condescending and never to involve all these seven-figure top uni administrators putting their money (not ours) where their mouths are, say by handing over their own expensive homes to these ‘traditional owners’. Because are they the rightful owners or aren’t they? Or is this just a preening, virtue-signalling exercise? (Don’t answer, that was a rhetorical question.) Let me put it like this. There’s no chance at all that someone like me would today end up in academia, not in this woke, über-left-wing, virtue-signalling university world.

And that’s why when former chief justice Robert French said in his report on free speech in our universities that he didn’t see a problem with free speech he was correct, but only in a Jesuitical, technical sense. In a world where 90 to 95 per cent of people share the same basic ‘progressive’, woke, left-leaning worldview, what would any of those 95 per cent ever say, or want to say, that would cause a vice-chancellor to invoke the code of conduct to attempt to discipline them? Remember, these codes are discretionarily enforced. (And don’t get me started on the woeful High Court decision in Peter Ridd that luxuriated in peacock-like preenings about free speech but then allowed a code of conduct to be used to fire someone who, they admitted, had done nothing improper when the university first invoked disciplinary actions against him. He apparently erred in fighting back publicly in defiance of the confidentiality provisions. Can you see how this is a one-way tool against conservative academics who can’t speak out even if the university is wrongfully disciplining them?)

That, then, is the university world that nine years of Coalition governments were happy to perpetuate, indeed allow to get worse and worse, despite the few conservative academics in the system writing books and papers pointing out possible reforms.  Nope. Not interested. Instead, these ‘Liberal’ politicians consulted with vice-chancellors (aka ‘the problem’) and brought in top judges who had left university so long ago they wouldn’t have a clue what things were like on the ground today.

And that brings me back to my opening question. If you’re operating a factory for left-wing grievance politics in law schools (I exaggerate, but only a bit) then you’d expect to see this reflected down the line in the law firms and at the Bar. You’d expect lawfare against mines and baseload power producers and oil exploration firms and the like to proliferate. You’d expect some barristers to start being selective about who they’ll take as clients, in the name of being virtuous. You’d expect organised hit jobs on advertisers who dare to spend money on the wrong sort of products and networks and shows. Heck, you’d expect the big law firms to become some of the most woke, most overtly PC workplaces in Australia (universities excepted).

But even I hadn’t expected that this attitude of ‘hey, we lefty lawyers have a pipeline to God on contestable moral issues, our moral antennae quiver at just the right virtue frequency’ would lead the ACT Director of Public Prosecutions to ask for the Evidence Act to be amended in a way that would change the rules of the game retrospectively in any second trial in favour of Brittany Higgins (she wouldn’t have to testify again or be cross-examined anew) and against the accused Bruce Lehrmann. Really? The US Constitution in Article 1, section 9 has a provision that forbids bills of attainder from being passed by the legislature. Loosely, these bills of attainder refer to trial by the legislature, to legislators declaring a person guilty without trial or via a show trial. Now this ACT initiative, if made retrospective, wouldn’t go that far. But you can see the similarities can’t you? This accused who steadfastly declares his innocence has already had to fight his corner with a then prime minister offering the complainant an apology on the floor of Parliament, with figures in the press just assuming he did it, with a university giving her a spot that implied he’d done it, and the list of infractions into the presumption of innocence going on and on. And now the ACT legislature is going to pass a special law whose timing, for all intents and purposes, indicates it was aimed at one person and one person only.

Here’s another example of left-wing legal activism. Did you see all the recent chatter about changing the rules around s.128 referenda? Professor George Williams, twice unsuccessful for Labor pre-selection and on the government’s constitutional expert group, says the rules are ‘not fit for purpose’.  The Labor minister in charge says they need to be ‘modernised’. The Labor A-G says the rules are ‘very antiquated’. Anyone worried that this is an attempt to game the system and try to salvage a Voice referendum that rightfully looks to be going down the toilet? You should be. Williams wants a ‘neutral’ message not the current ‘yes’ and ‘no’ cases – implicitly because as in universities or as with the recent pandemic we can apparently just ‘trust the experts’ (like him) and despite the fact our whole legal system is built on the adversarial process. Apparently, having each side present its own case is too ‘partisan’. Want to barf yet? Oh, and these people are talking about ‘misinformation’ safeguards and ‘truth in advertising’ protections. Got that? Anything that puts the case they don’t like too well in other words.

This is what you get when you let one side of politics wholly win the culture wars and take over the main institutions of society. You know, as in the universities.