I know a little about Australasia’s higher education institutions.
I have worked in seven of them, and taught in three disciplines, over four decades. Watching the decline of our universities into a mire of postmodernism, woke ideology, leftism and hyper-corporatist bureaucracy hasn’t been especially pleasant. They are now second rate – being generous – places populated by second rate academics. Do not dare call them scholars. They are measured by popularity with students, media mentions and research grant accumulation. Not scholarship.
What do all members of Australia’s lying Covid class have in common?
They all either had no spine, or else they had something to gain, or territory to protect, from going along with a Covid narrative that, from very early on, they knew to be false. Or at the very least, open to question. And at least two institutions of the Covid class are there to question things, to speak truth to power. These are the media and the academy. They both failed, not because they lacked spine – though their employees did – but because they are in the pay of either Big Tech or Big Pharma, or both. Here I want to focus on universities.
And their failure wasn’t merely a minor, “oops” moment. Their failure to investigate our Covid policy disasters and the globally coordinated campaign of medical disinformation was monumental and significant for both public and private health and societal welfare. Especially when alternate sources of information are deliberately stifled, as, for example, they routinely have been by Big Tech’s malfeasance. See under active search engine silencing and worse.
As Dr Phillip Altman has stated:
Since the introduction of the Covid vaccines, many questions have arisen about lack of adequate manufacturing practices, of quality control, of basic pharmacological and toxicological studies and of appropriate clinical safety and efficacy studies. There seems to have been a reluctance on the part of drug regulatory authorities in many nations to acknowledge both the unprecedented level of reported serious adverse drug reactions and deaths reported in association with these products. Why was the public not advised that the normal standards of quality, safety and efficacy were compromised in the name of national security and not applied to the development and testing of these vaccines? Why was this kept secret?
(Source: John Stapleton, Australia Breaks Apart, 2023, p 429). See also:
Setting aside (for the moment) the criminal behaviour of the drug cartel, the point here relates to those Judases who didn’t call them out. Instead, they got into bed with them. We needed society’s institutions to be curious, questioning, vigilant, investigative. Why weren’t they? The great John Ioannidis, widely recognised as the most cited medical researcher in the world, has stated:
"The greater the financial interests or prejudices in a given field, the less likely the research findings are to be true."
https://twitter.com/VigilantFox/status/1652740002617368577
Boom! Or as someone else once said, follow the money. And power. And prestige. Herein lies a compelling explanation of one of the great failures of modern Australia. The pursuit of riches, power and prestige, not of truth, is now the operating system of our universities.
Some years ago, Ioannidis famously claimed that between fifty and eighty per cent of medical research findings turn out to be wrong. So, the much-touted precautionary principle would suggest that we take most medical pronouncements with a large dollop of salt. Again, this makes an on-task fourth estate and academy critical to society.
One thing that Covid has done is to shine a very powerful light on our higher education institutions. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of Australian universities realised all this before. But now everyone knows, or should. Australian academe has joined the grifter class. John Stapleton’s magisterial account of Australia’s Covid story, Australia Breaks Apart (2023, A Sense of Place Publishing) reveals several instances of the culpability of the academy.
As Stapleton states:
The principal problem for government’s attempting to maintain credibility through this period was that much of the information, and the forecasts they relied upon, repeatedly shown to be wildly inaccurate, were resourced by the Bill Gates funded World Health Organisation, around which daily swirled ever greater controversies.
The massive funding of both academics and institutions from vested interests was a process known as regulatory capture on the one hand, and buying influence on the other, and had a severe influence on Australia, with a “bought” sign hanging from the necks of many of the establishment figures the public once trusted.
One of the New South Wales government’s favourite go-to experts was Professor Kristine Macartney of Sydney University, who infamously received $65 million in government grants for vaccine linked work.
How is that not a conflict of interest?
(Source: John Stapleton, pp 392-3; emphasis added).
Indeed. As the international evidence mounted that every last element of Covid policy was fraudulent AND deadly, it became critical for the Government Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex to find “trusted” voices to calm the farm and to maintain the narrative. That the virus was deadly, that we were all at risk of death, that lockdowns stopped the spread, that vaccines were “safe and effective” AND the only way back to freedom. Come on down, Professor Kristine.
Macartney is on the Advisory Committee on Vaccines of the Therapeutic Goods Administration. Our national body for all things Covid policy. And (of course) a consultant to the Gates-funded World Health Organisation.
Macartney said this in the NSW Supreme Court in 2021:
You can have a population that's spreading the virus through their various behaviours and because of the virus the vaccines are not 100% protective, you will see high rates of the virus being spread. That doesn't mean that you are also not protected against what the vaccines do which is protect against severe outcomes, primarily which is hospitalisation, death. They certainly do reduce the levels of the spread from one individual to the other, coming back to my point that if you're not infected you can't spread the virus, so that is transmission. But it's not appropriate to characterise just, you know, the performance of the vaccine based on simple ecological data in such a form.”
This is absolute gobbledegook. Tosh. However, it convinced the Judge that the vaccine mandates should stay. After all, she is part of the trusted Australian public health establishment. To be trusted. Talking bullshit all the while.
The Arkmedic (Dr Ah Kahn Syed) weighed in:
You [Macartney] got $65 million in government grants running a study that HAS to portray government policy (with mandates that likely resulted in thousands of deaths) in a good light or your grants will be pulled and you don’t have a conflict of interest? Are you kidding?
(Source, John Stapleton, p 393). See also:
And:
https://pennybutler.com/conflicts-australia-covid/
We are in blood-on-their-hands territory, methinks. Hired gun academics – do not ever, ever call them scholars – lied, and people died. And they lied for money. The connections between vaccine manufacturers, universities and the legacy media are tight, indeed symbiotic.
Then there is the case of prolific twitterer Josh Roose of Deakin University. Sadly, from my own discipline of political science. Well, political sociology at any rate. Josh opined:
Far-right nationalists, anti-vaxxers, libertarians and conspiracy theorists have come together over COVID, and capitalised on the anger and uncertainty simmering in some sections of the community.
They appear to have found fertile ground particularly among men who feel alienated, fearful about their employment and who spend a lot of time at home scrolling social media and encrypted messaging apps.
The far right are a lot more capable of recruitment than we give them credit for. They have found an audience who are angry, frustrated and looking for someone to blame.
This is particularly the case among young men who are increasingly attracted to right-wing nationalism and make up the majority of protesters. Victoria Police Commissioner Shane Patton has said the majority of protesters at the Saturday protest were men aged 25-40, who came with violent intent.
Many of these groups share similar ideas: that there is a cabal of politicians and elites who are oppressing you. That freedom is at risk, that one must stand up for liberty, that there is a wealthy and unelected ruling class controlling you.
(Source: John Stapleton, Australia Breaks Apart, 2023, p 142)
All the cliches are there from Josh – anti-vaxxer, conspiracy theorist, populism, far right – who, clearly, has little understanding of, or empathy with, the many hundreds of thousands of basically normal, decent people for whom Covid policies have spelt misery, ridicule, isolation, pain, unemployment or worse. Yes, people committed suicide because of lockdowns. More important to make it all about the deplorables and their foibles. Make them the issue. Make them seem extremist, loopy, prone to being duped. (The last is a little ironic, given the mass formation of societal try-hard, lemmings like academics during the Covid scam). Corral them into a group to be hated by the decent people.
The example of this academic shows the disciplinary breadth of the Covid class’s reach. Inevitably, Josh is a research grants star.
He is currently a Chief Investigator on an Australian Research Council (ARC) funded study The Far Right: Intellectuals, Masculinity and Citizenship (2021-2024) and lead Chief Investigator of the ARC funded project Anti-Women Online Movements; Pathways and Patterns of Participation (2022-2025).
https://www.deakin.edu.au/about-deakin/people/josh-roose
For years, the Australian Research Council has shovelled money out the door to any academic who included the words “climate change” in a grant application. Now it will probably be “Covid conspiracy” that will unlock the tsunami of grant dollars.
The poor old universities suffered great losses during Covid, of course. Their whole business model is based on having a pipeline of (mainly Asian) students flooding our campuses on their way to work visas then permanent settlement. That and online “learning”, which, like over-priced international student fees, is a scam. The words “online” and “learning” should never be used in the same sentence. When the country shut down, the students stopped coming. This meant poverty and massive job shedding for universities, and ghost town campuses. What a waste of infrastructure. No worries, Scotty from Astra Zeneca kept them afloat with research gigs, and no Pants-on-Fire Albo will turn the spigot back on so the Asian student hordes will be with us again soon, in their hundreds of thousands. All part of the immigration Ponzi scheme that we sometimes call the Australian economy.
We should be grateful to Covid for exposing the true nature of our universities. Corrupt. Captured. Dishonest. Now part of the fact-checker industrial complex. Totally compromised. Truth killers. Pretending to be scholarly. Smitten with woke politics. Populated with chancers. Employing slave labour (in the form of sessional staff) to do all the grunt work, while the “star” researchers go get the grants. Corporatised beyond recognition. And pretending, still, to educate the clueless generations, Y and Z. And, all the while, costing taxpayers gazillions.
Not fit for purpose. A disgrace.
Paul Collits
29 June 2023
And add the woke and always a victim feeling students to that mix.
Truly horrifying. So much rottenness at the heart. Nearly finished the Breggins book which is great background and then to John’s book.