Last week I made my first overseas trip on which I ticked the box ‘Australian resident departing permanently’. It’s given me cause to reflect on my career as an academic economist (and part-time journalist) in Australia.
This week, I commenced a new role as Head of the School of Economics, History and Politicsat Kingston University, London, 41 years after my life as an economist began in 1973. That’s not when my PhD was approved, nor when I got my first academic job, but the date on which I participated in the student revolt over the teaching of economics in a dispute that led to the formation of the Department of Political Economy at Sydney University in 1975.
This dispute has always been tagged with a left-wing brush. Australia’s current Prime Minister Tony Abbott, when he was President of the Students Representative Council at Sydney University in 1979, supported cutbacks to University funding on the grounds that they would force Universities to stop running courses like political economy:
Abbott: “Quite frankly I think that these courses are not only trivial, but they are attempts by unscrupulous academics to impose simplistic ideological solutions upon students, as it were to make students the cannon fodder for their own private versions of the revolution. And I think that if there were further cuts to the education budget well then we would certainly see the Universities cracking down on that sort of course. The fact that they can offer that sort of course is to me proof that there is room for further cuts.”
Interviewer: “You also suggest cutting out political economy?”
Abbott: “That’s right” (Tony Abbott, University of New England radio interview 1979)
Click here to read the rest of this post. (PS: this post had to be edited for length on Business Spectator. I will post the extended version here next week)
