High Cost, Casualised Academics, Corruption, Dumbing-Down,
Racism And Censorship – Why Study In Australia ?
By Dr Gideon Polya
20 August, 2013
Countercurrents.org
Overseas students from Asia have made Australian universities their destination for many years. Currently about 240,000 overseas students worth $16 billion per annum are a financial mainstay of the grossly underfunded Australian university system. However greed, anti-intellectualism, parsimony, dumbing down, corruption, racism and censorship are making Australian universities much less attractive to overseas students. Neoliberal, greed-driven, US lackey, look-the-other-way Australia is now the world's most expensive country for university education and the decline of the standards of Australian universities means that overseas students are getting much less for their money.
1. Cost – Australia is the most expensive place globally for university education.
For overseas students and their families the cost of higher education in Australia must be a major consideration. Australia is the most expensive place on earth for study by overseas students followed closely by the United States and thence by the United Kingdom .
Here are recent statistics from the Times Higher Education Supplement for the Average Annual Cost (in US dollars) for various countries of University Fees + Living Costs = Total Cost (in descending order of expense): Australia (25, 375 + 13,140 = 38,516), United States (25,226 + 10,479 = 35,705), United Kingdom (19,291 + 11,034 = 30,325), United Arab Emirates (21,371 + 6,004 = 27,375), Canada (18,474 + 7,537 = 26,011), Singapore (14,885 + 9,363 = 24,248), Hong Kong (13,182 + 9,261 = 22, 423), Japan (6,522 + 12,642 = 19,164), Russia (3,131 + 6,310 = 9,441), China (3,983 + 4,783 = 8,766), Taiwan (3,270 + 4,987 = 8,257), Spain (1,002 + 6,004 = 7,006) and Germany (635 + 5,650 = 6,285) [1].
2. Nobel Prizes – only 2 out of Australia 's 43 universities are directly associated with Nobel Prize-winning research.
An arguable measure of the current academic excellence of a country and thence in its universities lies in the number of Nobel Laureates awarded out of the total of 853 times since the inception of such awards in 1901. Thus considering the list of countries in descending order of Average Annual Cost, the number of Nobel Prizes (given in parenthesis) is: Australia (13), United States (338), United Kingdom (119), United Arab Emirates (0), Canada (21), Singapore (0), Hong Kong (1), Japan (20), Russia (27), China (8), Taiwan (1), Spain (8) and Germany (101). However it must be noted that population size is important (e.g. US versus the UK and Germany), societal wealth is important (e.g. China is much poorer per capita than Australia), societal freedom is important (setting aside the 1788 European invasion, Australia has never been invaded in an occupation sense and is a democracy), relatively few universities in any of these countries is associated with Nobel Laureates having studied or done their relevant work there) and in some cases the work leading the award was done in another country (thus while Australia and particular universities may variously “claim” its 13 Nobel Laureates, about half of Australia's Nobel Laureates did their relevant work overseas).
The similar success of Australia and Canada lies in their wealth, freedom from war on their soil, freedom from oppression and occupation, coupled with important cultural ties with the scientifically and culturally dominant UK and the US . However, of Australia's 39 taxpayer-funded universities and 4 private universities, the only 2 universities in Australia associated directly with Nobel Prize winning research are the University of Western Australia (per Robin Warren and Barry Marshall, who collaborated in the discovery of the bacterial basis of stomach ulcers) and the Australian National University (per John Eccles, for electrophysiology of neurons and the synapse; Brian Schmidt, involved in discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe; and Peter Doherty, involved in discovery of the how T cells work in immunity).
3. Entry Standards – deregulated influx of weaker students is dumbing down Australian university teaching and assessment.
Only about 140,000 people were studying at Australian universities in 1985 (notwithstanding the abolition of university fees in 1974 by the 1972-1975 Whitlam Labor Government that was reversed in 1989 by the Hawke Labor Government) but by 2011 there were 932,000 people studying at Australian universities of whom about 240,000 were overseas students. While only 10% of Australians had higher education qualifications in 1989, 17% in 2001 and 25% in 2012, the Federal Labor Government wants 40 per cent of 25 to 34-year-olds to have a bachelor's degree or better by 2025 and has deregulated university entry so that essentially anyone who applies for university entry gets in (if not to the particular course or particular institution) [3, 4].
In Chapter 5, “Every child wins a prize”, of his book “Australian Universities. A portrait of decline”, Australian neuroscientist and former academic, Dr Donald Meyers, describes the money-driven flooding of the universities with weak students and the perceived need by university mangers to maximize pass rates. Dr Meyers states “With respect to numeracy, by my estimate, more than half the first year science students who I encountered [at the University of the Sunshine Coast] could not successfully manipulate simple fractions and a higher percentage could not rearrange simple algebraic expressions to solve for a single unknown” (p116) [5, 6]. The influx of full fee-paying overseas students who want their piece of paper for the huge financial outlay involved, the flooding of Australian universities with lower quality Australian students, and the slashing of funding for universities, have led to a decline in attainment standards (in some cases students can gain credit based largely on take-home assignments), a decline in teaching standards (about 50% of undergraduate teaching is now done by cheap, casual, part-time academics) and a decline in the value of degrees.
4. Quality – Dawkinization has devalued Australian universities as teaching and research institutions.
Over 20 years ago, Australian universities were good quality research and teaching institutions. However in circa 1990 the Hawke Labor Government fused the research and teaching universities with the purely vocational training institutions called Colleges of Advanced Education (CAEs). This automatic downgrading of Australia 's universities has been called the “Dawkinization” of the universities after John Dawkins, the Minister for Employment, Education and Training during that period. Australia has an important residual vocational educational Tertiary and Further Education (TAFE) system that is now being investigated for restructure by … John Dawkins. The Dawkinization weakened the influence of top academics in rigorous disciplines, downgraded the university research culture, increased the power of the parasitic managerial academics, weakened academic collegiality, and ushered in Mickey Mouse courses by Mickey Mouse academics.
The Dawkinization of Australian universities fatally weakened the whole idea of universities as institutions devoted to quality scholarly research, research-informed teaching, and expert informing of the public to corporate entities dedicated to vocational training at the lowest possible cost. The notion of university corporate “brand” has encouraged managerialism, censorship (anathema to genuine scholars) and dodgy commercial advertising. The budget bottom-line has meant the axing of rigorous academic disciplines (e.g. areas of languages, philosophy and engineering) in favor of vocationally-oriented and accordingly popular areas in a dumbed-down system such as “business studies” and “hospitality” and the casualization of the academic workforce who are substantially no longer full-time researchers. Universities became dumbed-down institutions obsessed with arguable metrics - research was measured in terms of research funding acquisition, teaching in terms of bums-on-seats, pass rates and popularity, academic free speech was constrained in the interests of the “brand”.and academics have to spend a huge amount of time begging for money and justifying their existence through weighty KPI (Key Performance Indicator) assessments [7, 8].
The Group of Eight universities (aka the Big Eight universities) have banded together for lobbying purposes. The Big Eight are basically the older capital city universities with medical schools and top medical research and are otherwise referred to as “sandstone” universities (from the mode of construction of the older institutions) as opposed to the poorer and much less prestigious “brick” universities, typically without medical schools. The Big Eight include the University of Melbourne and Monash University ( Melbourne ), the Australian National University (ANU; Canberra ), the University of Sydney and University of New South Wales (UNSW; Sydney), the University of Queensland ( Brisbane ), the University of Adelaide ( Adelaide ) and the University of Western Australia (UWA, Perth ). However the distinction is getting a bit blurred as the University of Tasmania ( Hobart , Tasmania ), Flinders University ( Adelaide , South Australia ), Deakin University ( Melbourne , Victoria ), Newcastle University ( Newcastle , NSW) and James Cook University ( Townsville , Queensland ) now have medical schools. Medicine, dentistry, and to a lesser extent law, economics and paramedical graduates, can expect well-paid careers whereas employment for science and arts graduates is uncertain and poorly paid. These economic realities are reflected in differing entry standards and intense competition for the limited places in top courses. A top medical specialist could well earn $1 million annually and live in a $10 million palace whereas a young school teacher, employed from year to year on 1-year contracts, can be excluded from getting a home loan from a bank for even a $0.4 million home unit or apartment. However for all their self-trumpeted prestige, the Big Eight are not lily-white and have been variously associated with repugnant censorship and corruption as exampled below.
5. Research – Australian university research is underfunded and now threatened by incompetent Labor security laws
The Federal Labor Government recently slashed university research funds by $0.5 billion and has taken a total of $4 billion from the universities in recent years to pay for other things. Of extraordinary concern to scientists, academics and students is that Labor has passed a Defence Trade Controls Bill that makes it an offence punishable by 10 years in prison for an Australian academic scientist without an Australian Defence Force (ADF)- or Australian Public Service (APS)-supplied permit to inform non-Australians (e.g. overseas students by lectures, conference presentations, or publications) about thousands of chemical, biological or technological matters listed in the presently 353-page Defence Strategic Goods List. UK and US academics are exempt from corresponding laws i.e. US lackey Labor wants to discriminate against Australians in cutting edge research and teaching, and is also threatening Australia's $16 billion per annum Education Export industry involving circa 240,000 overseas students [9, 10].
Of course the Dawkinization of Australian universities meant an immediate degradation of the research culture which now ranges from top biomedical research in Big Eight Universities that get the lion's share of Australian Research Council (ARC) and National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) funding to Mickey Mouse research and zero research. Indeed, associated with this downgrading of the research culture has come a massive increase in over-paid, non-teaching, non-research management–only academics who are paid enormous salaries to bully research and teaching academics and replace full-time scholars with part-time , casual academics. Thus a vice-chancellor (VC; sometimes referred to as a university president) can be paid $1 million in pre-tax salary and perks, 100 times that of 1 genuine but part-time academic doing the vital job of teaching undergraduates. .
6. Teaching – dumbed-down teaching, assessments and degrees.
Because of the open doors, deregulation policy emplaced by the Federal Labor Government, Australian universities are being flooded by weaker students with a consequent dumbing down of teaching and assessment. About 50% of undergraduate teaching at Australian universities is now performed by casual, part-time academics doing more than the undergraduate teaching formerly done by full-time academics but in 10% of the time and for 10% of the money i.e. undergraduate students are now paying about 10 times too much for their undergraduate tuition. It would be interesting to know whether this violates Australian Trades Practices legislation. As indicated above in section #5, this also violates the traditional requirement for research-informed teaching in universities.
Australian universities are now in the hands of anti-academic, bean-counting managers on enormous circa $1 million pa salary packages who are dedicated to putting philistine Federal Government policy into practice. In addition to large scale sacking of scholars and massive casualisation of undergraduate teaching, this change of university culture from scholarship and teaching to making to money has meant pushing students through at all costs. Anecdotal evidence indicates course assessments in which most of the marks come from take-home assignments i.e. students are guaranteed a pass if they simply hop through enough routine hoops. Dumbing down of courses, soft assessments and corruption amount to scandalous devaluation of past, present and future degrees from Australian universities.
7. Censorship – anathema to scholars but obscenely associated with universities in neoliberal, corporatist Australia .
Censorship is antithetical to scholarship, research, science and science-based rational risk management crucial for societal safety - but censorship, through Codes of Conduct restricting free speech and bullying and intimidation in a downsizing environment, is entrenched in Australian universities. Such censorship must be exposed and stopped e.g. the censorship applied by the taxpayer-funded the universities-backed and universities-funded web magazine “The Conversation” that has an appalling record of sidelining, censoring, blocking, malreportage and defamation, most offensively in relation to anti-racist Jewish opinion critical of US and Apartheid Israel human rights abuses. About 18 universities back The Conversation, including the University of Melbourne, Monash University, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University (RMIT), Deakin University, Swinburne University of Technology, and Victoria University (Victoria), the University of Western Australia, Curtin University and Murdoch University (Western Australia), the University of Technology Sydney, the University of Newcastle and the University of Western Sydney (New South Wales), the University of Southern Queensland, Griffith University, the University of the Sunshine Coast, the Queensland University of Technology (Queensland), Charles Darwin University (Northern Territory), the University of Canberra (Australian Capital Territory) and the University of Tasmania (Tasmania). Only 1 of these universities, namely the University of Melbourne , responded (albeit negatively) to my repeated demands for action against this censorship [11, 12].
Universities that censor are unfit for our children [13, 14, 15, 16]. Thus even the highly ranked University of Melbourne, named after a genocide-based city named after a ruthless 19th century British politician complicit in the 1840s Irish Famine and other Victorian genocidal atrocities, has an appalling record of censorship and is associated with the endlessly censoring, academic-based web magazine The Conversation [14].
Things got even worse for Australian universities in 2012 with the passage of the Australia-United States Defence Trade Cooperation Treaty-related Defence Trade Controls Bill that makes it an offence punishable by 10 years in prison for an academic without a permit to inform non-Australians such as overseas students or international colleagues (in conversation, tutorials, lectures, conference papers, scientific papers etc) about numerous technologies and thousands of chemicals and organisms listed in a Defence and Strategic Goods List [9, 10].
Academic free speech in Australia is seriously constrained and is under threat of more to come [16]. Thus 2 leading anti-racist, pro-peace scholars at the prestigious University of Sydney, Professor Jake Lynch and Dr Stuart Rees (Director of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney and Director of the Sydney Peace Foundation) were threatened with legal action in Australia by an Israeli organization, Shurat HaDin, over their moral support for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Apartheid Israel. According to Dr Rees: “It may sound preposterous, but freedom of public debate and the voicing of dissent in Australia is being threatened by a law firm in another country… At the end of July [2012], Shurat HaDin… filed a class action racist complaint with the Australian Human Rights Commission over Professor Lynch's support for BDS. Such support, they say, is racist and anti-Semitic… In accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, the [BDS] campaign is based on Palestinian rights to self determination and on the obligation of the international community to respect those rights. Far from being illegal, the BDS movement seeks adherence to international law and uses non-violent means for doing so. It is supported by churches, NGOs, trade unions, by students and staff on campuses across the world and by significant artists and academics, including most recently Professor Stephen Hawking” [17]. .
8. Complicity in war crimes and genocide – university linkage to war, human rights abuses and genocide by US, UK and Apartheid Israel state terrorism.
Many A ustralian universities have allowed themselves to become soiled by association with genocidal Israeli militarism and with evidently pro-Zionist and pro-US censorship by the Australian taxpayer-funded, universities-backed and academic-based web magazine The Conversation. Australian universities and Australia 's premier research body CSIRO (the Commonwealth Scientific Industrial Research Organization) once had a fine reputation for intellectual leadership. This has now been tarnished by association of CSIRO and about 18 Australian universities with the academic–based web magazine The Conversation which censors informed, credentialled, anti-racist, humanitarian academic opinion [12, 14, 15] and by connections of some Australian universities with military research of racist, genocidal Apartheid Israel [18, 19].
Various Australian universities have been soiled by association with military research by racist, genocidal nuclear terrorist Apartheid Israel , specifically the University of Adelaide, Edith Cowan University, Deakin University, Sydney University, University of NSW, University of Newcastle, Victoria University, University of Adelaide, Australian National University, University of Western Sydney, University of Western Australia and Murdoch University, the University of Melbourne and Monash University [18, 19]. Monash University is named after a Jewish Australian WW1 general Sir John Monash who supported racist Zionism (unlike his Jewish Australian contemporary Sir Isaac Isaacs, the first Australian-born Governor General of Australia , who was staunchly opposed to racist Zionism, stating in 1946: “ The honour of Jews throughout the world demands the renunciation of political Zionism. ”). On 10 December 1918 Australian soldiers of the Anzac Mounted Division were involved in the premeditated massacre of about 100 inhabitants from the Arab village of Surafend in Palestine .
Censorship utterly violates the core academic ethos. Many Australian universities have been soiled by being linked with the Australian taxpayer-funded, Australian universities-backed and academic-based web magazine The Conversation which has sidelined, censored, blocked and egregiously defamed informed, credentialled academic opinion critical of the Apartheid Israel's Palestinian genocide and the Neocon American and Zionist (NAZI)-backed US Alliance Muslim Holocaust and Muslim Genocide. Such censorship-linked Australian universities include including the University of Melbourne, Monash University, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University (RMIT), Deakin University, Swinburne University of Technology, and Victoria University (Victoria), the University of Western Australia, Curtin University and Murdoch University (Western Australia), the University of Technology Sydney, the University of Newcastle and the University of Western Sydney (New South Wales), the University of Southern Queensland, Griffith University, the University of the Sunshine Coast, the Queensland University of Technology (Queensland), Charles Darwin University (Northern Territory), the University of Canberra (Australian Capital Territory) and the University of Tasmania (Tasmania).
In addition to various Australian universities being associated with pro-Apartheid Israel and pro-US censorship by The Conversation and with Apartheid Israeli militarism and hence Apartheid Israeli war crimes, Australian schools and universities are associated with a culture of ignoring Australia's secret genocide history and its complicity in 22 genocidal atrocities since 1788, 8 of them ongoing [20]. Australia has been involved for over 2 centuries in genocidal British or American wars. In particular, Australia has participated in all post-1950 US Asian Wars, these being associated with 38 million deaths from violence or from war-imposed deprivation, including the Zionist-backed US War on Muslims (12 million deaths since 1990 from violence or from war imposed deprivation) [20, 21, 22, 23]. Australia and its educational institutions have a culture of genocide complicity, holocaust complicity, genocide ignoring, holocaust ignoring, genocide denial and holocaust denial, noting that holocaust ignoring is far, far worse than repugnant holocaust denial because the latter at least admits the possibility of public discussion.
9. Lying – genocide ignoring, holocaust ignoring, genocide denial and holocaust denial.
Australian universities educate the élites in government, business, medicine, law, the media, education and the arts. According, Australian universities must wear a substantial part of the responsibility for Australia 's extraordinary look-the-other-way .culture of censorship, lying by omission and lying by commission. Australia 's cowardly and irresponsible universities have ensured the old adage “don't talk about religion, sex or politics at the dinner table” applies to the pubic trough in general. Thus Australia 's secret genocide history will remain largely secret thanks to censorship, genocide ignoring and holocaust ignoring by universities, university-trained élites and university-linked media like the ABC ( Australia 's equivalent of the UK BBC) and the academic-based web magazine The Conversation.
The worst genocidal atrocity of the 22 genocides with which Australia has been associated is the WW2 Bengali Holocaust in which the British, with Australian complicity, deliberately starved 6-7 million Indians to death for strategic reasons. During World War 2 Britain had a population of about 60 million and imported about half its food requirements. However imports roughly halved due to military exigencies and depredations of German U-boats. Thus Britain 's food imports 1940-1944 (in millions of tons) totaled 19.3 (1940), 14.7 (1943), 10.6 (1942), 11.5 (1943) and 11.0 (1944). In contrast, the population of India during WW2 was about 320 million and total grain production was 50 to 70 million tons annually. The population was growing at a rate of about 5% per year and there was a requirement of net imports of about 1-2 million tons of grain per annum to make up for deficiencies. However according to Behrens, grain shipments (in millions of tons) for India in 1942-1945 are as follows: 0.03 (1942), 0.3 (1943), 0.6 (1944) and 0.9 (1945).
Australia 's role in the Bengali Holocaust is a very well kept secret and for good reason. Australia was (and is) a major wheat producer and in the period 1939-1945 produced about 24 million tons, the breakdown (in millions of tons) being: 4.0 (1939), 2.2 (1940), 4.5 (1941), 4.3 (1942), 3.2 (1943), 1.5 (1944) and 4.0 (1945). About 9.4 million tons or 40% of Australia 's war-time wheat production was exported, the breakdown (in million tons) being: 2.0 (1939), 2.0 (1940), 1.0 (1941), 1.0 (1942), 1.5 (1943), 1.5 (1944) and 0.4 (1945). Only a possible maximum of about 1.8 million tons of wheat (and one supposes actually much less) - out of 13.0 million tons of wheat produced in Australian in 1942-1945 or of the 4.4 million tons of wheat exported from Australia in 1942-1945 - was sent to starving India (an alternative source having been British-occupied Iraq), with most one presumes being sent off to shore up Britain's huge war-time food surplus. Only a possible maximum of 0.9 million tons of Australian wheat made it to starving India in the key famine years of 1943-1944 and mid-1944 correspondence from Churchill to Roosevelt (29 April 1944) indicates that actual figure was as low as 0.35 million tons: “Wavell [Viceroy of India] is exceedingly anxious about our position and has given me the gravest warnings. His present estimate is that he will require imports of about one million tons this year if he is to hold the situation, and so meet the needs of the United States and British and Indian troops and of the civil population especially in the great cities. I have just heard from Mountbatten that he considers the situation so serious that, unless arrangements are made promptly to import wheat requirements, he will be compelled to release military cargo space of SEAC in favor of wheat and formally advise Stilwell that it will also be necessary for him to arrange to curtail American military demands for this purpose…By cutting down military shipments and other means, I have been able to arrange for 350,000 tons of wheat to be shipped to India from Australia during the first nine months of 1944. This is the shortest haul. I cannot see how to do more” [24].
By withholding wheat supplies, Australia help Britain kill 6-7 million Indians in the World War 2 Bengal Famine (Bengali Holocaust). The lack of grain supplies meant that the price of food rose enormously and it was inability to buy food rather than absolute food deficit that killed 6-7 million Indians. Today, Australia as a world leader in annual per capita greenhouse gas pollution, is disproportionately contributing to a worsening climate genocide that is set to kill 2 billion Indians , 0.5 billion Bengalis and 0.3 billion Bangladeshis this century if man-made climate change is not seriously addressed. In 1995 I performed a social experiment. I wrote a detailed account of the Bengali Holocaust (Bengal Famine) - and its likely repetition on an even more horrendous scale due to man-made climate change - and sent it to Australian MPs, media and university vice chancellors (VCs). My letter was tabled in the Australian Senate after an impassioned speech by India-born Greens Senator Christabel Chamarette . However only 2 VCs replied, one with a detailed statements he had commissioned from an Australian historian stating how wonderful Britain had been for India, and the other referring to a leading holocaust scholar who subsequently published my account in a scholarly journal [25, 26,; see also 22, 23, 27]. .
Australian universities have informed the Australian National History Curriculum for secondary schools which deservedly devotes a major place to the WW2 Jewish Holocaust (5-6 million killed, 1 in 6 dying from deprivation) but ignores the 30 million-victim WW2 European Holocaust (30 million Slavs, Jews and Gypsies killed), the WW2 Chinese Holocaust (35 million died under the Japanese, 1937-1945) and , of course, the Australia-complicit Bengali Holocaust (the first WW2 atrocity to have been described as a “holocaust”). Australian universities have evidently adopted the adage that “Asia begins east of Vienna ” and the traditional Australian and British imperial view that Asians lives don't matter.
Many more examples of Australian academic and media censorship and lying can be given. A useful compilation is “ABC fact-checking unit – incorrect reportage by the ABC ( Australia 's BBC)” that records lying by commission and omission by the appalling universities-informed ABC [ 26; also see 11 and 27-33]. Australian universities have helped entrench a racist culture of genocide ignoring, holocaust ignoring, genocide denial and holocaust denial in Australia, reiterating that genocide ignoring and holocaust ignoring are far, far worse than repugnant genocide denial and holocaust denial because at least the latter admit the possibility of public discussion.
10. Racism of White Australia - new anti-Asian politically correct racism (PC racism) in look-the-other-way, universities-perverted Australia .
The egregious racism of White Australia is reflected in the 1901-1974 White Australia Policy and dispossession, persecution, and active and passive murder of the Indigenous Australians (2 million deaths from disease, dispossession, deprivation and violence since 1788 in the ongoing Aboriginal Genocide) [34]. However the entrenched cowardice and social dishonesty of Australian universities has helped inculcate a new politically correct racism (PC racism) in Australia whereby Australians insist that they are not racists while ignoring Australia's horrendously genocidal maltreatment of our Asian neighbors in the ongoing Zionist-backed US War on Muslims (20 million refugees and 12 million deaths from violence and violently-imposed deprivation since 1990) [21]. Australian Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has described those trying to find safe haven for Muslim refugees as “Scum of the earth who should rot in hell”, this raising the question (not put in racist, look-the-other-way Australia by anyone except myself) as to how we should describe the Zionist and US Alliance war criminals who drove over 20 million Muslim refugees from their homes and countries in the first place. I have performed another experiment, writing a detailed letter to about 3,000 Australian academics setting out the Big Picture realities utterly ignored in look-the-other-way Australia . The silence was deafening with only several academics replying out of this huge cohort. The same disgusting, look-the-other-way behaviour is seen in universities-trained presstitutes of the ABC (Australia's BBC) who, like the Australian universities, have an entrenched culture of censorship, lying by omissions, lying by commission and politically correct racism (PC racism) [11, 26, 29, 33].
11. Immigration – except for honorary Whites, prospective non-European students or other non-European visitors to Australia need to apply by a “special form”.
Except for what one could call “poor Whites” from most Eastern European countries, people from mostly White countries wishing to visit Australian can rapidly obtain a visa by applying electronically. However for people from non-White countries (Asia, Africa, Latin America and the “poor Whites” of most of Eastern Europe ) must apply in person to an Australian embassy using a separate form involving far more stringent requirements. Prospective non-European students are surely aware of the Australian White Australia Policy (1901-1974) which effectively excluded Indians and other non-Europeans from Australia but which was enacted in a sneaky, secretive fashion to minimize offence to the hundreds of millions of non-European subjects of the brutal, racist British Empire . However, today there is a secret, New White Australia Policy whereby Europeans (with some exceptions) can apply on-line for visas to enter Australia but non-Europeans (with some exceptions) must apply on a completely separate form with more rigorous demands and submit it to an Australian embassy. This New White Australia Policy meant, for example, that the Indian national bowls team, who wanted to do some training in Australia prior to the New Delhi Commonwealth Games, was excluded. An Immigration official said that the players and their trainer were a flight risk after they were found to have insufficient bank savings and to lack incentives to return home: "Consideration was given to each applicant's reasons for visiting Australia , their financial capacity and their incentives to return to their home country. If applicants have insufficient funds to support their stay or a determination is made there are insufficient incentives for an applicant's return home, the visa application is refused" [35].
Former Australian Labor leader Arthur “2 Wongs don't make a White” Calwell stated “We will not let the yellow hordes contaminate our golden shores” (p183, [22]). Why should non-European prospective overseas students study in a racist country that insults and discriminates against them before they even step foot on Australia 's “golden shores”? A major attraction for Australia as a place to study was the possibility of residence after graduation. The Federal Labor Government has now made such residence much more difficult and in so doing has retrospectively punished overseas students attracted to Australia on what turned out to be false pretences.
12. Violence – citizen violence against Asian students and government violence against Asian refugees in Australia .
In recent years there has been much publicity in India over cases of egregious violence against Indian students in Australia . Similar concerns have been raised over violence to Chinese students. These incidents reflect a huge well of ignorance, racism and xenophobia among uneducated Australian yahoos and red-necks. Anti-Arab anti-Semitism and Islamophobia have been entrenched in Australia by a Neocon American and Zionist Imperialist-perverted Mainstream media, politician and academic establishment with the 2005 Cronulla Riots being a large-scale expression of this repugnant sentiment. Muslims will tell you of the deep offence they have received. A dangerous intellectual racism is the new politically correct racism (PC racism) of university-educated Australians (with the notable exceptions of the Greens and Socialists).
Thus Labor PM Kevin Rudd recently hit upon the election-winning solution to the problem of tens of thousands of Muslims fleeing genocidal, Zionist-backed US wars and Tamil refugees fleeing the Israeli-backed Sri Lankan Tamil Genocide and coming to Australia by boat, this generating populist “stop the boats” hysteria by the Liberal –National Party Coalition opposition. PM Rudd's inhumane solution was to declare that no refugee arriving in Australia by boat would ever be permitted to reside in Australia and would be sent to concentration camps in Papua New Guinea for eventually settlement there or a third country. The Coalition further advanced the inhumane bipartisan race to the bottom-of-the-barrel by declaring that over 30,000 refugees already living in dire poverty in Australia on highly restrictive bridging visas would never be allowed top become proper Australian residents. About 80% of Australians support this egregious human rights abuse, with the Greens (10%) and Socialists (1% of the vote) being staunchly opposed. The publicly-stated, politically correct racist (PC racist) position of the Liberal-National Party Coalition and Labor (aka the Lib-Labs or Liberal-Laborals) is that they are doing this to stop the “people smugglers”, “the people smugglers' business model” and “refugees deaths at sea”.
13. Corruption – Australian universities have an appalling record of censorship and other corruption.
Inquiries into Australian universities have found astonishing examples of corruption including soft assessment corruption, dumbing down, effective paying for degree units, financial corruption, plagiarism, fraudulent science, bullying, intimidation , persecution and entrenched dishonesty. However the most serious corruption of all is the culture of censorship within Australian universities that, as outlined above, is utterly antithetical to research, teaching and learning. Universities that censor are unfit for students [12-18].
14. Illiteracy – high functional illiteracy and innumeracy in Australia underscores failure of the universities-based education system.
The failure of neoliberalism in wealthy Australia has also been exposed by Australia 's Educational Apartheid system that means that the children of the wealthy go to well-resourced, taxpayer-subsidized private schools but most Australian children attend poorly resourced State schools run by the various State Governments. Australia 's Educational Apartheid system means that 46% of Australians are functionally illiterate and 53% are functionally innumerate [36], that 80% of Indigenous children in the Northern Territory fail to meet basic literacy and numeracy standards, and that the majority of Australian children who attend State-run schools (as opposed to taxpayer-subsidized private schools) are disproportionately excluded from a good education, university, good universities and top professional courses such as medicine and law. [37].
15. Accredited Remote Learning – All for ARL and ARL for All.
Education at all levels should be free. In recent decades a new culture developed whereby many “on-campus” students at Australian universities will attend only the first week of lectures and then rely on downloadable lecture notes and other teaching materials from the web. Essentially free web-based provision of detailed lectures and other teaching materials coupled with further electronic teaching and learning aids means that high quality teaching and learning is possible for minimal cost to unlimited “off campus” students (quality accrediting examinations can be provided for a token examination fee of, say, circa $10 per semester unit or the cost of a snack and a cup of copy at a cheap eatery). The top US universities 144-Nobel-Laureate Harvard University and the 80- Nobel-Laureate Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) now put their courses on the web for free. National or state governments could provide translations of these courses into indigenous languages (if required) and offer free accrediting examinations (i.e. a free version of the user-pays MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses). This sort of free Accredited Remote Learning (ARL) will be opposed by the neoliberal academic managerial mafia and the Establishment as an erosion of their power.
Summary.
Australia has been a destination for many overseas students in the past and currently about 240,000 overseas students worth $16 billion per annum are a financial mainstay of the grossly underfunded Australian university system. However greed, anti-intellectualism, philistinism and parsimony are killing off the goose that laid the golden egg. Australia is now the world's most expensive country for university education and such education is now much less attractive due to dumbing down of courses, soft assessments, lowered standards, violence against Asian students, anti-Asian, anti-African, and anti-Muslim xenophobia, and academic corruption. The devaluation of academics and learning in neoliberal Australia is evidenced by massive downsizing and casualising of academia, the dominance of anti-academic managers and bean counter-driven dumbing down. The readily realizable, free, high quality Accredited Remote Learning (ARL) and MOOCs ( Massive Open Online Courses) approaches make the huge expense of studying at low quality, corrupted Australian universities a huge waste of money. The main reasons why overseas students should not study at complicit Australian universities are outrageous intimidation and censorship of academics by universities, by the Australian Government via the US-linked Defence Trade Controls Bill (10 years in prison for non-compliant academics) and by the universities-linked organizations the ABC (Australia's BBC) and the academic-based web-magazine The Conversation. Prospective overseas students should seriously ask themselves - why study at Australian universities?
References.
[1]. David Matthews, Australia “most expensive”: for overseas students”, Times Higher Education Supplement, 13 August 2013: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/australia-most-expensive-for-overseas-students/2006492.article .
[2]. “List of Nobel Prizes by country”, Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_country .
[3]. Lucinda Schmidt, “A matter of degrees”, The Age, 30 May 2013: http://www.theage.com.au/national/education/a-matter-of-degrees-20130530-2neo9.html .
[4]. “Degrees and certificates more popular than ever”, Australian Bureau of Statistics, 29 November 2012: http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/latestProducts/6227.0Media%20Release1May%202012 .
[5]. Donald Meyers, “ Australian Universities . A portrait of decline” (AUPOD).
[6]. Gideon Polya, “Book review: “Australian Universities. A portrait of decline” by Donald Meyers”, Countercurrents, 4 February 2013: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya040213.htm .
[7]. Richard Hil, “Whackademia. An insider's account of the troubled university”.
[8]. Gideon Polya. “ Book Review: “Whackademia” reveals parlous state of Australia 's censored, under-funded & dumbing-down universities”, Countercurrents, 14 December 2012: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya141212.htm .
[9]. “Impact of the Defence Trade Controls Bill on academic freedom”, NTEU, 10 October 2012: http://www.nteu.org.au/article/Impact-of-the-Defence-Trade-Controls-Bill-on-academic-freedom-13461 .
[10]. “Universities Australia response to the Defence Trade Controls Bill”, Universities Australia, 2012: http://www.universitiesaustralia.edu.au/page/submissions---reports/reviews-and-inquiries/2012-submissions/defence-trade-controls-bill/ .
[11]. “Censorship by The Conversation”: https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammediacensorship/censorship-by .
[12]. Gideon Polya, “Censorship by Australian taxpayer-funded ABC and university-backed The Conversation”, Countercurrents, 30 April 2012: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya300412.h t m .
[13]. “Current academic censorship and self-censorship in Australian universities”, Public University Journal, volume 1, Conference Supplement, “Transforming the Australia University ”, Melbourne , 9-10 December 2001: http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/57092/20080218-1150/www.publicuni.org/jrnl/volume/1/jpu_1_s_polya.pdf .
[14]. Gideon Polya, “Academic censorship: why you should NOT study at the University of Melbourne ”, Bellaciao, 5 November 2012: http://http.bellaciao.org/en/spip.php?article22283 .
[15]. Gideon Polya, “Censorship in Australian universities”, MWC News, 29 October 2012: http://mwcnews.net/focus/analysis/22488-gideonpolya-censorship.html .
[16]. Brian Martin, C.M. Ann Baker, Clyde Manwell and Cedric Pugh (editors), “ Intellectual Suppression : Australian Case Histories, Analysis and Responses”: http://www.uow.edu.au/~bmartin/pubs/86is/ .
[17]. Stuart Rees, “Defending the right to dissent”, New Matilda, 12 August 2013: http://newmatilda.com/2013/08/12/defending-right-dissent .
[18]. Gideon Polya, “Australian universities complicit with pro-Zionist censorship and genocidal Israeli militarism”, Countercurrents, 24 May 2012: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya240512.htm .
[19]. Vacy Vlazna, “Israeli Hawkademia in Australian Universities”, Palestinian Chronicle, 05-02-2012: http://palestinechronicle.com/view_article_details.php?id=19268 .
[20]. Gideon Polya, “ Australia 's secret genocide history”, 30 April 2008: https://sites.google.com/site/aboriginalgenocide/australia-s-secret-genocide-history .
[21]. “Muslim Holocaust, Muslim Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/muslimholocaustmuslimgenocide/ .
[22]. Gideon Polya, “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History” (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 1998, 2008), now available for free perusal on the web: http://janeaustenand.blogspot.com/ .
[23]. Gideon Polya, “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007), now available for free perusal on the web: http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ .
[24]. Gideon Polya, “ Bengal Famine. How Australia & UK killed 6-7 million Indians in WW2”, MWC News, 27 September 2011: http://mwcnews.net/focus/editorial/13742-bengal-famine.html .
[25]. Polya, G.M.(1995) The famine of history: Bengal 1943. International Network on Holocaust and Genocide vol.10, 10-15 and Gideon Polya, “The Forgotten Holocaust - the 1943/44 Bengal Famine”: http://globalavoidablemortality.blogspot.com.au/2005/07/forgotten-holocaust-194344-bengal.html .
[26]. “ABC fact-checking unit – incorrect reportage by the ABC ( Australia 's BBC)” : https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammediacensorship/abc-fact-checking-unit .
[27]. “Boycott Murdoch media”: https://sites.google.com/site/boycottmurdochmedia/ .
[28]. “Censorship by the BBC”: https://sites.google.com/site/censorshipbythebbc/ .
[29]. "Censorship by ABC Saturday Extra": https://sites.google.com/site/censorshipbyabclatenightlive/censorship-by-abc-sat .
[30]. “Mainstream media censorship”: https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammediacensorship/home .
[31]. “Mainstream media lying”: https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammedialying/ .
[32]. “Censorship by The Age”: https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammediacensorship/censorship-by-the-age .
[33]. “Censorship by ABC Late Night Live”: https://sites.google.com/site/censorshipbyabclatenightlive/ .
[34]. “Aboriginal Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/aboriginalgenocide/ .
[35]. Gideon Polya, “New White Australia Policy. Apartheid Australia violating human rights”, MWC News, 24 October 2011: http://mwcnews.net/focus/analysis/14355-white-australia.html .
[36]. Josh Fear, “Choice overload. Australians coping with financial decisions”. The Australia Institute, Discussion paper 99: http://www.tai.org.au/documents/dp_fulltext/DP99.pdf
[37]. "Educational Apartheid": https://sites.google.com/site/educationalapartheid/ .
[38]. Gideon Polya, “Accredited remote Learning”: http://accreditedremotelearning.blogspot.com.au/ .
[39]. Gideon Polya, “Crisis in our universities”, ABC Radio National, Ockham's Razor: 19 August 2011: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/ockhamsrazor/crisis-in-our-universities/3490214 .
Dr Gideon Polya has been teaching science students at a major Australian university for 4 decades. He published some 130 works in a 5 decade scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference text "Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds" (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, New York & London , 2003). He has published “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007: http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ ); see also his contributions “Australian complicity in Iraq mass mortality” in “Lies, Deep Fries & Statistics” (edited by Robyn Williams, ABC Books, Sydney, 2007: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s1445960.htm ) and “Ongoing Palestinian Genocide” in “The Plight of the Palestinians (edited by William Cook, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2010: http://mwcnews.net/focus/analysis/4047-the-plight-of-the-palestinians.html ). He has published a revised and updated 2008 version of his 1998 book “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History” (see: http://janeaustenand.blogspot.com/ ) as biofuel-, globalization- and climate-driven global food price increases threaten a greater famine catastrophe than the man-made famine in British-ruled India that killed 6-7 million Indians in the “forgotten” World War 2 Bengal Famine (see recent BBC broadcast involving Dr Polya, Economics Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen and others: http://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/history/social-economic-history/listen-the-bengal-famine ). When words fail one can say it in pictures - for images of Gideon Polya's huge paintings for the Planet, Peace, Mother and Child see: http://sites.google.com/site/artforpeaceplanetmotherchild/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/gideonpolya/ .
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