Rita Panahi: Australians’ hard earned tax dollars fund wacky academic projects
Australians suffering under a cost of living crisis will be relieved to know their hard earned tax dollars are going to fund a range of absurd academic projects covering every far Left obsession, including race, slavery and colonialism.
Opinion
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Australians suffering under a cost of living crisis will be relieved to know their hard earned tax dollars are going to fund a range of wacky academic projects like identifying “the causes of gender bias in the staged English-language translations of Ancient Greek tragedies”.
The Australian Research Council has seen fit to grant more than $3.7m for a project led by Professor Liza Lim which “aims to advance the role of the arts as the missing link in global movements of multispecies justice, using innovative musical approaches to communicate the urgency of climate change and lead social change”.
I wish I was kidding but these are direct quotes from ARC’s own website.
Every far Left obsession is catered for from race, slavery and colonialism to trans issues to global warming. Indeed the climate cultists are getting a big chunk of the largesse. Just look at some of the projects your taxes are funding.
More than $3.1m granted to Monash University to “innovate new ethnographic methods to investigate the role of future human values in developing a path towards technologically supported environmental sustainability”. The project is concerned with “the impact of human futures on Australia’s digital and net zero transition”.
Over $600,000 going to Southern Cross University for “advancing child and youth-led climate change education with Country”. We are told the project “conceptualises and advances climate change education with Country. Climate change education is not adequately understood within Western science.
Western perspectives on climate crises are in deep contrast to Indigenous perspectives enmeshed in continuous storying with descendants, ancestors, and Country.”
RMIT receives more than $440,000 to look at “how the art sector engages with colonial history” and the University of Western Australia has $658,000 to “bring Australia into the global history of slavery by exploring the legacies of British slavery in SA and Victoria … and produce a new history of the continuing impact of slavery wealth in shaping colonial immigration, investment, and law.”
If these topics appear highly political it’s because they are; and all in the one direction. Among the most absurd is $434,000 granted to Sydney Uni to undertake a “comprehensive study of the relationship between policing and popular music in Australia” which academics claim meets the “national interest test” as “the Australian colonial nation state has always had a particular relationship to crime, with sovereign land stolen, and First Nations people policed, in order to build a penal colony based on punishment and redemption.” Give us a spell.
Rita Panahi is a Herald Sun columnist
Originally published as Rita Panahi: Australians’ hard earned tax dollars fund wacky academic projects
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