One of the last things any sane conservative columnist would ever dream of suggesting at the moment is ‘Hey, let’s copy New Zealand.’ The former Labour government of Jacinda Ardern plunged race relations to an all-time low.  The top Kiwi judges seem intent on becoming a sort of imperial judiciary making things up willy-nilly out of thin air in the name of intuiting fundamental rights – a trait our judges here in Australia also exhibit, not least in that disgraceful Love decision. Then there were the ridiculously thuggish lockdowns over there, the ones that imposed the greatest infringement on people’s civil liberties in two centuries and were only surpassed (to our shame over here) in the state of Victoria, Australia. The long-term effects of closing schools, pretending the young were remotely vulnerable, shutting small businesses based on throwing darts at a phonebook, making up distancing rules out of thin air, and then spending taxpayers’ monies like drunken sailors (who, at least, are spending their own money), well, the consequences of all that are blatantly obvious should you visit New Zealand – but, of course, many now don’t because tourism numbers are also way down from pre-Covid numbers. And have I mentioned such productivity-sapping ‘innovations’ as the explosion of ‘working from home’? Yes, I know this is affecting all Western nations, and Australia perhaps worse than the Kiwis. But they can afford it less than we can. Meantime the newish right-of-centre Kiwi government has done little to rein in the puffed-up judiciary. Its moves to tackle the previous Labour government’s unleashed Maori co-governance changes are plodding at best. And certainly not remotely brave. Nor should anyone forget that New Zealand spends virtually nothing on defence, making its citizens the very definition of free-riders in this Hobbesian world of ours.

I could go on. And on. But by now readers can see why it might be unwise loudly to proclaim,‘Hey, let’s copy New Zealand.’ You might find your nearest and dearest quietly checking you into the nearest asylum. Well, call me psychotically, Trump-like brave because I’m going to do just that as regards one big step needed to reform our completely broken university sector. In December last year the NZ government announced that it was ending all Marsden grants (think our ARC grants or just government grants paid by the taxpayer) to the humanities and social sciences. There will be none moving forward. Zero. Zippo. Wunderbar! This is a great first step, though I’d add to it a mandate that the top-20 highest-paid employees for each university must have their exact salaries released each year (wanna bet how many will be administrators?). That and I’d make each university tell us the percentage of their employees who neither teach nor publish, just administer stuff like DEI crap. For most unis the non-publishing, non-teaching percentage will be well over half, up to sixty per cent. Would any business, small or big, have over half the employees administering the rest? (I don’t count the ABC here as a business for obvious reasons.)

But back to ending these grants. Look, the incentive structures in antipodean universities are flat out bizarre. Most all writing, researching and publishing in the humanities and social sciences can be done without grants and was up until three decades ago. Here’s the thing. Our universities treat inputs as outputs. It’s hard to measure how good some book or chapter or article is. And because universities live by the motto that meaningless data is better than no data at all, they love grants. You can measure how much money some academic brings in by way of grants. I kid you not, if two academics had the exact same outputs – two publications in some world-class, peer-reviewed journal, say – and one did it without any taxpayer-funded grants at all and the other had received a huge government grant to write the paper, then the second academic would be feted and the former could lose her job. ‘Where’s your grant-getting ability?’ It’s analogous to going out and picking the new car you’ll buy based on which car company gets the most taxpayer subsidies via grants.

And much, much worse, the whole grant-getting procedure is not remotely politically neutral. Why? First off, the left has captured academia. In the US political donations are public information and recently some law professor trolled through five years of data to see the ratio of Democrat donating law professors to Republican donors. It will shock no one to learn that it was about 36 to 1. And yes, we know it’s about the same here in Australia. Remember the Voice campaign?  There are some 37 or 38 law schools in this country. You could count on one machine operator’s hand how many legal academics came out publicly against the Voice compared to the myriad supporters. (Full disclosure: I was one naysayer. I know all the others. It’s too dangerous for us all to travel on the same plane.) It is flat out undeniable that universities are monolithically partisan workplaces where some departments (think women’s studies, think Aboriginal studies, think sociology, the list goes on) display the entire gamut of political viewpoints from A half-way to B. And grants don’t award themselves. They are decided on by senior academics and university and government bureaucrats, requiring endless paperwork and huge costs. Do you need me to tell you how many grants are given to study the importance of (not the worthlessness of) religious freedom? To look at the flaws of bills of rights? Or against Voice-like proposals? Heck, how about even Peter Ridd-type investigations to consider whether, contrary to orthodox ABC views, the Barrier Reef is just fine and dandy? Listen to this self-proclaimed Democrat-voting US academic lamenting the fact that ‘many disciplines have reconfigured themselves to serve as a kind of epistemic support department for the Democratic Party’. So these grants cost taxpayers oodles. The topics grants explore lean to one side more than the sinking Titanic. They’re not needed (as that same left-voting US academic also conceded). They are then used to indirectly keep conservatives out of academia – it being a fact that what wins grants in the humanities and social sciences are areas and questions of zero interest to conservatives.

It’s a shell game all the way down producing worthless data that is used to pretend those international university ranking systems are anything other than meaningless rubbish – a big component going into the rankings is asking other academics what they think of universities, and also what students think, as well as seeing how many international students you get – they assume this means quality, I think it shows how easily your country hands out visas.

I, and others, have been pointing this out since Tony Abbott was PM. The Coalition never showed the slightest interest. Instead, every year things have gotten worse; more politicised, lower standards; worse experience for local kids; higher salaries for university bureaucrats. To the extent the Coalition did anything it was to chat to vice-chancellors (they’re the problem) and commission some judge to look at university policies on free speech (forgetting that all codes of conduct are discretionarily enforced – see Palestinian encampments to get what I mean).

Yes, it will be shameful to admit to having copied New Zealand. Still, just stop all grants to the humanities and social sciences. On day one in office.