When you hold right-of-centre views like mine, that makes you fairly unusual in today’s Australian law schools and wider university departments. Everyone knows it but I’ll say it bluntly. Viewpoint diversity is collapsing in our universities, not least because of the woeful ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’ bureaucracies. Note that ‘equity’ is focused on the old Marxist notion of equality of outcome, not on the liberal ideal of equality of opportunity. Pick only favoured jobs or places (never dangerous or undesirable ones), treat everyone as part of some group, calculate the percentage of this type of reproductive organ holder or skin pigmentation place-holder in the wider society, and then demand that exact level (or better, better is fine) of representation for the particular job or place – because, you know, everyone in a group must be exactly the same in his or her life goals, ambitions and desires as others in the group? Be honest. It’s quota thinking, barely disguised. And these quotas are supported in all sorts of indirect ways too, such as when the reaching of some desired group outcome (aka the hiring of more of the desired group) is made part of a dean’s KPIs to affect his or her pocket book.

Inclusion, likewise, is just linguistic cover for advancing favoured left-wing groups; it never aims for viewpoint diversity or for including a lot more devout Christians, say. Worse than all that, the bureaucracies that drive these mantras create a world that is very unsympathetic to conservatives and classical liberals (and vice versa) – not least because many such people, like me, believe in merit and don’t think quotas of any kind are desirable and we won’t mouth the condescending, patronising acknowledgements of country. Just before you go for promotion try saying out loud ‘that this job we’re advertising shouldn’t just effectively be reserved for a woman or Aborigine or whatever the Left’s favoured group is at the moment’. Think that will go well? (Full disclosure: I was head-hunted eighteen years ago from overseas to a named chair and have never had to go for promotion in this country. Phew!) Of course much of the rot was overseen by the Coalition. Things in universities got worse every one of the nine years while they were in government. Heck, the whole push by the ‘moderates’ of the Liberal party for female quotas for preselections mimics this identity politics ‘diversity’ garbage exactly. You can’t be for quotas (however disguised with the siren talk of ‘diversity’) and also be for merit. Right?

This all leads me to tell you – you’ll be shocked to hear this, I know – that on occasion I have been described by the odd other Aussie legal academic as someone whose views are ‘hard right’. (It happened recently, in fact, and in a peer-reviewed law review to boot. I responded in the University of Queensland Law Journal just last week because the journal that ran this piece calling me and a few others ‘New Righters’, ‘Hard Righters’ – the terms of abuse went on and on – would not run my reply.) But here is the thing.

You could not put a piece of paper between my political views and those of John F. Kennedy. Sure, he’d probably be more inclined to have myriad hookers come into the White House on a regular basis. But remember, Kennedy was for low tax; he was big on American self-defence (not to forget exceptionalism) in this Hobbesian world of ours; he believed there is a mind-independent truth about the world and that that truth prevails over hurt feelings or people’s desires to be something they aren’t; he was committed to the Martin Luther King notion that you judge people solely by the quality of their character and achievements and not by the colour of their skin or in terms of some group identity you can stuff them into and maybe afford extra privileges to – this Martin Luther King view being in line with the old Menzies’ notion of ‘liberalism’ and a single-minded focus on the individual that does not exist on the ‘moderate’ wing of any Liberal party across Australia today, the surrender to identity politics being what it has been. Oh, and I’m pretty sure that JFK could tell you what a woman was. Let’s be honest, the man had as much expertise on that front as just about any XY chromosome being going.

Alas, those views, which mirror mine in all essentials, apparently make you a hard right zealot in today’s Australian academia.  And the Libs wonder why universities are becoming a conservative-free zone! Three or four years ago I recall being told by some conservative friends, who weren’t academics, that Alan Tudge was finally doing something about this as the relevant minister. He was sorting out free speech concerns having brought in former Chief Justice Robert French to write a report. Well, I’m afraid that view was laughable. French said there was no free speech problem on campuses. And that is true, but misleading. There is no free speech problem because campuses are overwhelmingly staffed by those with left-wing views. I can’t think of anything they’d want to say that would cause a vice-chancellor to invoke the code of conduct against them.  Even the ‘Chicago Principles’ that prioritise free speech concerns a good deal more than does the French recommendations don’t stop self-censorship and the declining numbers of conservatives on campus – not even at Chicago university itself. (Check out the recent Legatum survey out of the UK if you want to read depressing data on how much conservative academics and conservative students self-censor. Do you think they do that for no reason at all or because of the way universities are run?) Look, the former Coalition government did not lift a finger to help Peter Ridd while the High Court of Australia issued a judgment that virtue-signalled on free speech and then made those concerns effectively lose to the university’s code of conduct on grounds that showed their lack of real commitment to free speech. No Coalition government that cared about free speech on campus would have failed to act in the Peter Ridd saga. But then Coalition governments don’t care about free speech do they? They couldn’t even tackle our woeful s.18C hate speech laws. They couldn’t even summon up the will to make the Senate vote down any repeal.

I’ll finish with some good news. A handful of US state legislatures are passing laws to defund their publicly-funded state university ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ bureaucracies. Completely defunding them. And it’s spreading to more and more US states. For a first step to turn around our failing universities this would be the single best thing you could do. These are big, expensive bureaucracies. They are the very definition of ‘bullshit jobs’ – if you removed them the institution or company would not just be the same, it would be better. Someday, we can only dream, a Liberal party might grow a backbone and pledge to do the same. How do these geniuses in the partyroom think things will go for them when conservatives are virtually non-existent on campus?

Right now you could count on one machine operator’s hand the number of public law professors against the woeful Voice proposal.

I wonder why?