What does Acknowledgement of Country have to do with learning the law?

An Indigenous Australian man gestures as a Welcome To Country ceremony is performed.

Torquemada would be proud of Macquarie University. Students at its law school enrolled in a legal subject called Age and The Law have been told they will fail part of their law degree if they refuse to deliver an Acknowledgment of Country when presenting an oral assessment.

This is compelled political speech. No ifs. No buts. This is a person in authority at Macquarie Law School telling non-Indigenous students that if they don’t deliver an Acknowledgement of Country, or if they belong to the local tribe, a Welcome to Country, in the fashion prescribed by the marker, they fail. No debate welcome.

If you use the compulsory words but don’t utter them with sufficient reverence, you still fail. Big Brother, or in this case maybe Big Sister – Associate Professor Dr Holly Doel-Mackaway runs the course – is apparently going to assess your feelings.

Is this how the Macquarie law school roots out those it thinks are racists? Are those who refuse to give the Acknowledgement, or don’t pour their heart and soul into the prescribed words, to be secretly tagged as racists? And if so, with what consequences?

Macquarie University Vice-Chancellor Professor Bruce Dowton.

It’s one thing to fail a subject, or do poorly, if you don’t know what the law is, or if you can’t identify the issues in a legal problem. But to fail or get bad marks in a legal subject for not uttering a form of political speech in the correct tone as mandated by a lecturer is an abuse of authority.

The marking rubric for presentations in the subject, LAWS5005, says a student will fail if they “did not present an Acknowledgement of Country or a Welcome to Country at the beginning of the presentation or did so in a way that was inappropriate or did not comply with instructions”.

A student fails if “there is significant room for improvement and further thought required for this to be considered culturally respectful”.

This kind of compulsory political dogma takes us on the road to a modern form of McCarthyism.

What if a local Indigenous student doesn’t buy into the Welcome to Country belief? What if an Indigenous student agrees with Jacinta Nampijinpa Price that Welcomes to Country are overused? What if a student – Indigenous or not – agrees with the Juru people of Burdekin Shire, in northern Queensland, who voted last December to end Welcome to Country ceremonies on their land, citing concerns over misuse and a loss of cultural significance.

Mindless group think is bad enough, but compulsory mindless group think is the stuff of nightmares. It is not necessary to ask what George Orwell would have written about this, or even John Stuart Mill. Tempting as it may be, you don’t need to conjure up overblown comparisons with the Great Leap Forward, compulsory recitations of Mao’s thought, or Stasi demands for political orthodoxy. This is, quite simply and obviously, a profound betrayal of what a university should be.

What does the Acknowledgement of or Welcome to Country have to do with the aged, or indeed with the law? This is not a politics course. Even in a politics course, compelling adherence to a form of words that represents a legitimately contestable stream of political thought would be unacceptable.

The most spectacular lightning rod moment in the voice debate came when Indigenous leader Marcia Langton said she would no longer deliver another Welcome to Country if the country voted no to a constitutionally entrenched race-based body.

There was an audible national sigh of relief from thousands of Australians. Many thought this was the best inducement they had yet heard to vote no. Very many people were heartily sick of Welcomes to Country and the variant Acknowledgement of Country, and believed they had become profoundly political and divisive. Langton’s words kicked off a debate the country had been too afraid to have.

There are significant arguments about the provenance and legitimacy of the relatively recently formulated Welcome to Country too. And witness the positive reactions among many to Peter Dutton’s announcement that a Coalition government would no longer pay for Welcomes to Country – in part because they have become far too commercialised.

Even among devotees of Welcomes, there is growing discussion about whether it is appropriate to have a Welcome, or an Acknowledgement, without also reciting or playing the national anthem.

There is a healthy debate about Acknowledgements of and Welcomes to Country in the public square – but not at the taxpayer-funded Macquarie University.

What if a Macquarie law student thinks outside the box and delivers the following: “I acknowledge the First Nations peoples of Australia and their elders, past present and emerging. I also acknowledge all those Australians who, or whose forebears, came to this country subsequently. Together, all these peoples have made a contribution to Australia for the benefit of all Australians.”

Marcia Langton.

The bottom line is that this is highly contestable territory. But at Macquarie Law School there is no room for the free thinker, let alone a conscientious objector. It’s probably no coincidence that Macquarie Law School hides this draconian forced political speech-marking rubric from public view. It’s only accessible by students who enrol in the course. We can’t access it. We can only learn about it if students tell us. If students tell me, in confidence, about other forms of enforced indoctrination, I will report those too. And if there is any kind of witch-hunt or other repercussions for students, we’ll report that too. Students deserve better than living in fear of Big Brother or Big Sister.

And so do taxpayers. The current educational swamp, a mix of ideology and inertia within the federal Education Department and TEQSA, means this sort of imposed conformity goes unpunished. TEQSA is a joke regulator. When has it ever enforced the standards we expect of taxpayer-funded universities?

Macquarie University ought to have its federal funding docked on the evidence of this abuse alone. And if elected, Dutton should introduce a sliding scale of penalties depending on the nature of the breach. This one is serious. Academic freedom is not the freedom to demand group think from students. That’s authoritarianism.

If Macquarie Law School wants to indoctrinate students, let it find private donors to fund its law school. When I did a law degree, we were educated about the law, how to think for ourselves, trained to use logic and reason to argue coherently. Many law students went into the world able to speak truth to power. The power that needs exposing here is Macquarie Law School.

While the country is finally moving in one direction, with a sense of relief, to be able to freely discuss and raise concerns about Welcomes and Acknowledgements, universities have become hotbeds of rigid and prescriptive ideology.