Our Bull Shitten Universities
Even those with only the slightest interest in everyday Australian politics will have noticed that William Richard Shorten has “retired” from politics. It has been the story of the week. Seldom has so much been written on a man of such little consequence. Alas, I am about to add to it.
There have been many takes on this. Has he seen the writing on the wall for his career-long aspirations to the prime ministership? Does he see the writing on the electoral wall for Labor? Does he find abhorrent Labor’s terrorist-adjacent stance in relation to Hamas? (If so, why has he been silent, all this time?) Does he see his NDIS “reforms” as his crowning “achievement”?
His financial comfort as he eases into “retirement” has also created the odd headline. It is a nice old sinecure, his new gig as Vice Chancellor of the University of Canberra, aka the Canberra College of Advanced Education, as it was before the 1980s Dawkins “revolution” which, at as stroke, doubled the number of our universities. To our eternal cost. The University of Canberra is currently the 403rd best university in the world, on one measure. Giddy stuff.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13820039/Bill-Shorten-university-canberra.html
One who will not be celebrating Bill’s latest “transition” is one Kathy Sherriff. Kathy claims, to this day, that Bill Shorten raped her when she was sixteen. Kathy may be mad, or lying, or mistaken, or vindictive. Or none of the above. Aren’t we all now enjoined to believe them all?
https://kathysherriff.com/
Bill seems to be the male accused outlier in an age when “we believe you”, and a time when the presumption of innocence has been reversed for many. An age when Craig McLachlan, George Pell, John Jarratt, Bruce Lehrmann, Christian Porter, Fr John Fleming, Geoffrey Rush and countless other men have had to face their day in court – or in the court of public opinion – as a result of complaints of sexual harassment and much worse. Careers and reputations have been crushed. Not Bill Shorten’s, though. He has just sailed on through.
Perhaps someone should raise the allegations with the brand new Chancellor of the University of Canberra, one Lisa Paul. She is said to be a “social justice advocate”. (And, in another irony, she was “Co-Chair of an Independent Review of the National Disability Insurance Scheme”). A daughter of the Canberra establishment. I assume she is an old mate of Bill’s.
Good old Bill. Ironically, it was Bill Shorten who, as then Leader of the Opposition, said in response to the release of the report of the Royal Commission into Institutional Reponses to Child Sex Abuse (in 2018):
I want to repeat one thing which we said in the House but it cannot be repeated enough: to all of you who have suffered, we understand at long last, and many before, but at long last it's been said aloud and in the most important law-making part of the Australian democracy, it was never your fault, it is not your fault and I terribly apologise for the fact that you weren't believed.
I am so, so sorry. (Emphasis added).
They weren’t believed, outlier Bill said.
Keith Windschuttle has stated:
… he [Prime Minister Scott Morrison] and Opposition Leader Bill Shorten gave a public apology to victims of child sexual abuse, and declared they believed all complainants were telling the truth. The apology was delivered in Parliament House on October 22, 2018, just seventeen days before the start of the trial that convicted Pell of child sexual abuse. Most of the jurors in that trial would have heard the apology’s repeated refrain — “I believe you, we believe you, your country believes you” — as well as the invective heaped on religious authorities, police and magistrates who in the past failed to heed that message. It was no wonder Pell was declared guilty at that time.
https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/uncategorized/women-power-gets-contagious/
It is a plausible argument that the Pell stitch up was massively helped by ScoMo and Bill’s double act of sorrow in the Parliament following the Royal Commission set up by Gillard to stitch up the Catholic Church.
Kathy Sherriff seems to be an outlier herself. No defence there, from the ALP mean girls, Katy, Penny, or from Louise Milligan, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s normally on-message slayer of the male-accused.
Bill, like his Clintonian namesake, seems to have been a protected species, shielded by colleagues and by the media. Aided by Daniel Andrews’ silence on the subject, for example. Andrews said, infamously, that “I believe you” (Witness JJ) in another notorious case. He had sooled his political police onto George Pell and, in effect, had steered the Pell persecution. Kathy Sherriff didn’t score a second thought from feminist Dan. Andrews went further in his support of Shorten’s career.
A headline in The Age from 2019 reads:
Andrews' $1.7m spend on Shorten ads slammed by corruption watchdog.
Daniel Andrews' $1.7 million spend backing Bill Shorten in the federal election has been condemned by both Victoria's corruption watchdog and the state Ombudsman.
The state government spent about $1.7 million on an "Our Fair Share" advertising campaign at the federal election, accusing "Canberra" of slashing hospital funding.
The television, radio and online ad campaign was slammed by the Victorian Opposition which argued taxpayer funds should not be used for political advertisements.
In return, Bill said of Daniel Andrews on his (Andrews’) retirement last year:
Congratulations and farewell to Daniel Andrews. Your tireless contributions to our great state have been tremendous.
Well, that was one way of describing Andrews’ tenure.
Clearly, party trumps the sisterhood. Penny Wong, one who we might have assumed was on the side of Australian womanhood, said:
Bill Shorten is one of Labor's greats.
https://x.com/SenatorWong/status/1831549934182789219
Oh dear. Once, saying that would have meant Gough Whitlam or Bob Hawke of Paul Keating or Ben Chifley or John Curtin or Neville Wran, or even Jack Lang. Setting aside ideology wars, most could agree with the merits of this list. But Bull Shitten? A credibly accused rapist. Who achieved nothing. He couldn’t even win the unlosable election (in 2019), against ScoMo, for God’s sake. His “career” was built upon some (engineered) media appearances during a Tasmanian mining collapse, and his promotion by a few corporate types.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaconsfield_Mine_collapse
The currency is being demeaned, right here. Of course, from memory, Wong and the other Labor mean girls, as well as the ABC squad, were up to their armpits in the political assassination of Christian Porter, working in all sorts of ways to bring him down. Over the alleged rape of a sixteen-year-old girl. She met the “victim”. Funny how life pans out.
Bill was only ever a hero to the AWU (Australian Workers Union). A “lion” of the Australian labour movement.
Woop-de-do. Who cares? Who has even heard of the AWU, these days? Who under forty could even say what AWU stood for? There is massive narrative construction afoot here.
Shorten’s achievements? Well, Johannes Leak this week past depicted Bill as a whiskered rat rowing away from a sinking ship on fire, a ship that had “NDIS” printed on its side. Memorably, Bill once claimed on air that “I don’t know what she [then Prime Minister Julia Gillard] said, but I agree with it”.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2012/apr/27/australian-minister-video
Shorten famously slithered between supporting Gillard against Rudd, then supporting Rudd against Gillard. First, there was 2010:
According to the ABC's 7:30 Report, the seeds for Gillard to challenge Rudd were sown by "Victorian Right factional heavyweights" Bill Shorten MP and Senator David Feeney, who had between them secured the support of "New South Wales power broker" Mark Arbib.
A headline in 2015 stated:
I wouldn’t have moved against Gillard without Shorten’s support: Rudd
https://theconversation.com/i-wouldnt-have-moved-against-gillard-without-shortens-support-rudd-43667
Two faced Bill slithered. And he lied. Here we have fibber Bill:
Bill Shorten says he regrets making “a mistake” in 2013 when he emphatically dismissed leadership talk just days after meeting with Kevin Rudd to discuss replacing Julia Gillard as prime minister.
The opposition leader has faced questions about his honesty at the height of the leadership drama after the ABC’s Killing Season series highlighted how Shorten met with Rudd at Parliament House on the night of the Midwinter Ball on 19 June 2013.
Shorten told 3AW interviewer Neil Mitchell two days later that he had not been asked to review his support for Gillard and that he would not review his position.
Oops.
Bill had his business mentors and protectors, a little like Bob Hawke with Peter Abeles. The Financial Review reported in 2017:
In the 1990s Labor leader Bill Shorten went on a vacation to Easter Island, Argentina and Cuba on Richard Pratt's private jet.
When Labor leader Bill Shorten was palling around with the billionaire price fixer Richard Pratt in the 1990s and early 2000s, he went on a vacation to Easter Island, Argentina and Cuba.
As a wedding present, Pratt and his wife, Jeanne, held a lavish engagement party for the couple [Shorten and his first wife] at their mansion in Kew, Raheen, which had once been the residence of Catholic Archbishop Daniel Mannix, himself a powerful figure in Australian politics.
… Then secretary of the AWU, Shorten had a debutante-like appearance at the National Press Club in 1999. Pratt came along like a proud father and threw a soft-ball question at him live on television.
"I'm comfortable in my own skin," Shorten declared ...
Which skin was he talking about? The son of a "fitter and turner" who became an anti-markets champion of the working class while enjoying the hospitality of the man who employed his members? The private school law graduate who supported lower corporate taxes before he opposed them? The political street fighter who helped take down two of his own party's leaders (getting promoted each time) and then said Australians are sick of politicians fighting?
A suck-hole to billionaires, then, despite his union roots. He parlayed his rich connections into a political career. As Aaron Patrick has noted:
His famous appearance at the 2006 Beaconsfield mine rescue of Todd Russell and Brant Webb was only possible because a billionaire who employed his members, Richard Pratt, loaned the young union leader a private jet to get to Tasmania in time for the live news coverage.
More recently, Shorten was very much part of the Covid tyranny, even while in opposition. During Covid, Bill proved himself to be a bit of a vaccine warrior. In 2021 we had this:
Shorten backs mandatory jabs for MPs.
Even Dominic Perrottet recanted on this “mistake”. No apology, though, from Bill, despite the mountains of peer reviewed evidence that the vaccines – never really vaccines, of course – were unnecessary, useless and dangerous.
Subsequently, Shorten reported to the Parliament, when as a Minister in Government, with seeming pride:
… that less than 1 per cent of applications received under the Covid-19 vaccine claim scheme had been approved.
Now there is an achievement. I raise this at a time where vaccine deaths are being shown to be far higher than previously thought or admitted, Shorten shouldn’t be allowed, on retirement, to get away with this bull. As Dystopian Downunder has reported this week:
Official Covid vaccine death count 50% higher than thought.
Death data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics reveals Covid vaccines as underlying cause of more deaths than recognised by the drug safety regulator.
Bull Shitten by name, and by nature and instinct. His parliamentary answer and the record of payments to the vaccine injured have been nothing short(en) of a national disgrace.
Aaron Patrick sums up Bill’s political career thus:
The Australian National University’s long-running, credible elections survey found Shorten was rated inferior, in the two elections he lost, to then Liberal prime ministers Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison on eight out of nine character traits. He got the lowest score for inspiring leadership, at 21 per cent, in the study’s history.
Inferior to both ScoMo AND the Malchurian Candidate. Double ouch. I doubt that an assessment of one’s political prowess could be much worse.
Bill Shorten hasn’t had much of a personal story, either. He left his first wife (Debbie Beale, daughter of Liberal MP and businessman Julian Beale) for another woman. That would be the daughter of the once Governor-General, Quentin Bryce. According to one report:
While neither Bill nor Debbie have gone on the record to discuss exactly what happened, Labor sources told The Telegraph that Bill separated from Deborah after he told her at an AFL game that he didn’t “think” he “wanted to be married any more”.
The source said Deborah was “totally shocked” by the split.
https://www.nowtolove.com.au/lifestyle/parenting/bill-shorten-first-wife-55332/
Nice. What have the ALP foot soldiers actually been protecting all this time, one may ask? Was Bill ever worth protecting?
So much for Bill’s “career” and life story. What of his next “career”?
As with so many leftie-types, like Mark Scott (these days much urged to resign his post at the University of Sydney) and so many others, Bill has landed in the university sector. Where else? The seamless career pathways for the elites are clearly defined. The ruling elites form a career club, with guaranteed opportunities for rich pickings for those who serve their time in what used to pass as public service. Senior political positions now seem no more than CV building for what is to come afterwards.
Much has been made of Bill’s salary as incoming VC of the University of Canberra, variously pitched at either $1.2m or $1.8m. Indeed, the question is worthy of debate. As one report notes:
The new job and salary expectations come amid questions surrounding the salaries of Australian university bosses - who are the highest-paid in the world, according to an analysis by Canadian consultant Alex Usher.
According to Mr Usher's data, UC was ranked 421 best university in the world when Mr Nixon was getting his $1,045,000 package in 2022.
His salary was the same as that of Dame Louise Richardson, who ran Oxford - the best university in the world.
Similarly, Flinders University boss Colin Stirling was paid about $1,345,000 - which was $100,000-plus more than the head of Harvard University, Lawrence Bacow.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13820039/Bill-Shorten-university-canberra.html
VC salaries in this wide brown land clearly aren’t linked to institutional excellence, then.
The bigger question, of course, is why ANY vice chancellor should be on such an income. And why a clapped-out ex-politician of dubious morals with a non-existent policy record and a tendency to lies and treachery should be considered worthy of such office.
Employing ex-politicians as vice chancellors reveals much, n’est-ce pas? Then we have the chancellors. Think Julie Bishop, Michael Egan, Gareth Evans, Stephen Martin, Patricia Forsythe, Steve Bracks and Chris Ellison, for example. At least the chancellors are merely ceremonial (whatever they might think), and most of them come from the business or public policy sectors. One is even a former High Court judge. The gravy train isn’t always about massive corporate riches. University appointments provide substantial prestige. It matters not whether they ever had any serious, previous academic excellence. (Shorten has a BA and a Bachelor of Laws from Monash; oh, and an MBA from the Parkville Asylum).
Until the 1940s, vice chancellors didn’t exist in Australia. There weren’t needed. Back in the day, universities were communities of scholars, and of modest scale. Until Robert Menzies and his successors started expanding them. They certainly weren’t corporations or money-making ventures. Until the Australian Research Council and fees for students were introduced. Now, they are. That is why universities are, these days, in the business of maintaining their quotas of (much higher) fee-paying international students, and whinging loudly when they don’t get the steady, guaranteed supply. It explains why they are so in favour of mass immigration, legal or otherwise. This keeps them afloat. It also explains why there is a housing crisis for students living near university campuses.
So, they are now employed as “CEOs” (not so much vice chancellors). To keep their business models afloat. And for this, the universities need, above all else, CEOs with the ear of government and of corporate funders. Now, they think, to give their universities added prestige.
The universities produce graduates with the “right” world view, ready to move seamlessly into government, corporates, NGOs and other quasi arms of the state. They import students in order to drive the mass immigration, replacement theory goals of the state. They harvest research grants that will keep afloat the climate narrative. Research grants provided by the same state. These provide the very reasons that justify the continuance of the massive university bureaucracies that we now have. Where over half the employees of the universities are “administrative” staff. Marketers, PR people and the rest. People employed to perpetuate a corrupt system. A system perpetuated by both sides of politics, these past thirty years.
The Covid era provides the perfect example of coinciding aims and of the essential corruption of the system. Academics collaborated with the greatest attack on human freedoms in our history. Enough said.
Education is our second largest industry. A Ponzi scheme, alas. We need urgently to get higher education right, though how on earth this might be achieved, given that we at the bottom of a long, slippery slope, is anyone’s guess. Coalition and Labor governments have been tinkering at the edges since 1987. Each “reform” of higher education only ever makes things worse. It is a case of the dreaded incrementalist model of public policy.
There are too many students. Not nearly enough are failed. Most students arriving are functionally illiterate, and aren’t really any better when they leave. Degree programs have ballooned. The degrees granted to international students are a busted flush. Campuses are hotbeds of revolutionary fervour. Teaching is downgraded in the interests of chasing the almighty research dollar. Academics are in bed with corporates. Half the universities are glorified TAFEs.
Hence, Vice Chancellor Shorten. It is a beautiful result, all around. They deserve each other, based on the performance and qualities of each. But the real lesson of this week isn’t ultimately about Shorten. It is about our once great halls of learning. After all, they picked him!
At least this is one good that has come out of the past week and Bill’s big announcement. It has shone a brighter light than normal on the academy.
Paul Collits
8 September 2024
Great article and sadly its all too true. The university graduates I see are mostly functionally innumerate and illiterate, have never read a book outside of the prescribed texts and reading lists, have no curiosity and are not interested in life long learning, scholarship or knowledge. They specialize in their chosen field and have no knowledge about the broader culture and world they lived in.
Shitten should have a coat of arms with this written in Latin;
I don’t know what she [then Prime Minister Julia Gillard] said, but I agree with it”.
Amr