Tudge flags further free speech measures as sacked climate sceptic loses High Court case

Universities face the prospect of further rules to protect academics’ free speech after Education Minister Alan Tudge raised concerns about a High Court decision upholding the sacking of marine physicist and climate change sceptic Peter Ridd by James Cook University.

The decision ends Dr Ridd’s four-year legal battle with JCU after he was censured and ultimately sacked for challenging his colleagues’ views on climate change and the Great Barrier Reef, along with the university’s attempts to discipline him.

Dr Peter Ridd failed to overturn James Cook University’s decision to sack him.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Mr Tudge said on Wednesday he was “concerned that, in some places, there is a culture of closing down perceived ‘unwelcome thoughts’ rather than debating them” and was seeking advice on the case’s implications.

“While I respect the decision of the High Court, I am concerned that employment conditions should never be allowed to have a chilling effect on free speech or academic freedom at our universities,” he said. “University staff and students must have the freedom to challenge and question orthodoxies without fear of losing their job or offending others.”

Dr Ridd, a long-serving professor at the university, was fired in 2018 after forming the view that the scientific consensus on climate change overstated the risk it posed to the reef and vigorously arguing that position.

In a unanimous decision on Wednesday, five justices of the High Court dismissed Dr Ridd’s appeal, finding his early criticism of climate research and the reef was protected by academic freedom but that he later went much further, justifying his termination.

The university welcomed the outcome as confirmation “that the termination of Dr Ridd’s employment had nothing to do with academic freedom”, saying in a statement it strongly supported the freedom of staff to engage in academic and intellectual freedom.

Dr Ridd took a parting shot at the university as he informed his supporters of the outcome on Facebook.

The university’s actions, he said, “were technically legal” but it was “never right, proper, decent, moral or in line with public expectations of how a university should behave”.

Dr Ridd said one of the worst consequences of the decision was it allowed universities to demand disciplinary processes stay confidential, undermining government legislation designed to support intellectual freedom.

“I know a couple of really egregious cases happening right now where freedom of speech has been curtailed, and the university is sitting on confidentiality,” Dr Ridd told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. “I can’t even tell you who they are because they would lose their job.”

Dr Ridd, who says he is only sceptical about “cataclysmic climate change”, wants the government to legislate to provide further protections to free speech directly in academics’ employment contracts.

Mr Tudge has previously used the threat of legislation to force universities to adopt free speech protections, warning earlier this year he would act if they did not fully implement a model code on free speech. All 41 Australian universities now have policies aligned with the code, proposed by former High Court chief justice Robert French, and will report against it annually.

Dr Ridd, the Institute of Public Affairs and the National Tertiary Education Union had argued that whatever the merits of Dr Ridd’s views, he was protected by a right to academic freedom in the university’s collective pay agreement with staff.

The university argued Dr Ridd was not sacked for his views but instead breached its code of conduct, which required staff to act in a courteous and respectful way, and confidentiality requirements about the disciplinary process.

The High Court found intellectual, or academic, freedom as contained in the university’s pay deal “is not qualified by a requirement to afford respect and courtesy in the manner of its exercise” and as a result, an initial censure in 2016 against Dr Ridd was not justified.

The justices quoted 19th-century philosopher John Stuart Mill in their reasoning.

“Whilst a prohibition upon disrespectful and discourteous conduct in intellectual expression might be a ‘convenient plan for having peace in the intellectual world’,” the justices held, “the ‘price paid for this sort of intellectual pacification, is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind’.”

The union hailed that aspect of the judgment as a win. But that did not result in a win because the court found Dr Ridd’s conduct extended well beyond the expression of opinion within his area of academic expertise.

Had his conduct related only to his area of expertise or criticism of the JCU decisions through proscribed processes, it would have been protected by intellectual freedom. Because his case was run on an all-or-nothing basis, that meant Dr Ridd lost.

“This litigation concerned conduct by Dr Ridd far beyond that of the 2016 censure, almost none of which was protected by the intellectual freedom. That conduct culminated in the termination decision, a decision which itself was justified by 18 grounds of serious misconduct, none of which involved the exercise of intellectual freedom,” the judges found.

The Institute of Public Affairs, which had helped Dr Ridd run his case via crowdfunding and public relations support, said the decision showed Australia’s universities were mired in a crisis of censorship.

“Our institutions increasingly want to control what Australians are allowed to say and what they can read and hear,” executive director John Roskam said in a statement that also announced Dr Ridd would be joining the institute as an unpaid research fellow to work on “real science”.

The federal government in March legislated a definition of academic freedom into university funding laws – a push led by former education minister Dan Tehan, who said last year he’d received legal advice that Dr Ridd would not have been sacked had the definition been in place at the time.

The definition, which was also based on wording recommended by Mr French in his government-commissioned review of free speech at Australian universities, includes “the freedom of academic staff to teach, discuss, and research and to disseminate and publish the results of their research” and “to contribute to public debate, in relation to their subjects of study and research”.

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