I saw you caught between/All the people out making a scene

I’m getting pretty bloody sick of this (Federal) Government and their attacks on academia and research.

Now, before I start this rant, please bear in mind that I am not an academic. Nor do I “love them and want to have ten thousand of their babies”*.

The latest research to feel the ire of the government is the Australia@Work report, authored by John Buchanan and Brigid van Wanrooy. It’s part of a five-year study, funded in part by the AUSTRALIAN RESEARCH COUNCIL (ARC) to determine people’s attitudes to working and working conditions. In a study of over 8000 people, they found that lower-paid workers were likely to be around $100 worse off under an AWA than they would be under a collective agreement. This was dismissed by Joe Hockey, Peter Costello and John Howard as being union-sponsored tripe, carried out by former union officials and wannabe ALP hacks.

This is not the first report which has found AWAs wanting. And most reports have also found that some workers will be better off through their negotiation of better packages. But the Government doesn’t want to acknowledge that while SOME workers might be better off, they are at this advantage at the distinct cost to lower paid workers who cannot negotiate their pay from the same starting position. Howard’s claim that the ABS had found WorkChoices to be good for workers was also dismissed by the Bureau themselves yesterday, they have not even done the kind of research he quoted and are not due to do so until May next year.

Before this report came out, the Government was busy dismissing a major report which suggested that women are much worse off under WorkChoices, conducted by leading academics Barbara Pocock and Sara Charlesworth (among others). The women this report followed were not the blustering, hearty workers who could blithely negotiate a stack of extra cash and more holidays. They were, in many cases, lacking the language or education to negotiate a better deal, and in many cases ended up with a significantly worse one, because they desparately needed to keep their jobs.

These are just two of the many reports which have been released since the advent of WorkChoices, all of which have been dismissed by the Government as union-sponsored government bashing. They’ve also been at pains to dismiss their own research, claiming that it was ‘too early to tell” what the effects of WorkChoices would be.

Before WorkChoices, it was ‘A Time to Value’, Pru Goward’s ground-breaking research on a national Paid Maternity Leave scheme. Goward undertook the research as Sex Discrimination Commissioner, a Government funded position. This didn’t stop Tony Abbott, then Workplace Relations Minister, that any such scheme would occur “over his dead body”. Goward and her team spent thousands of hours testing propositions regarding paid maternity leave with the public, business, unions and peak bodies around the country. I went to two separate events facilitated by Goward herself – her approach was balanced and probing, and despite our underlying political differences, I cannot fault her methodology, which was intelligent and thorough. This didn’t stop her being rubbished by the Government.

‘Bringing Them Home’ is another classic example. Howard started undermining the report before it had even been released. Ronald Wilson, author of that report, was not some lefty-biased super-liberal (certainly anyone who remembers WA Inc. would know that this claim was superficial at best). He was just some one trying to get to the truth of what had happened. But rather than heed his report, the Government claimed that the report had got it wrong by heeding too closely the views of those “wronged”, and not paying enough attention to the possibility that children were better off outside their family homes.

And don’t even get me started on the bevy of highly credible researchers who have offered the Government their findings on global warming (or as it is now popularly known, climate change).

Now it’s not that I don’t respect the Government’s right to take an alternative opinion. That is of course their choice. It’s the adversarial system of politics. But what I object to (in the most strenuous way possible) is the immediate dismissal of a report without due attention to its contents.

Not one of the reports listed above asked people about their voting intention. Not one of them was conducted by a market research company in the interests of determining which way the political wind was blowing. Perhaps, given the panicked reaction of Government to the string of bad opinion polls, that was their flaw.

One of the underlying reasons for my fury is that the same people who argue strenuously that the report findings are the stuff of paranoid fantasy, also argue that research in of itself is next to useless. Research isn’t useless – it’s essential. Policy should be based on more than a feel-good (or spend-good) notion, it should be based on strong and ethical research frameworks which inform the development of policy and its implementation.

Sometimes that research is going to find governments (of all stripes) lacking. But that’s reality. Governments don’t always get it right, and sometimes it’s important to take one on the chin and admit that mistakes have been made.

It's really not that hard to say sorry.





* Not even Pru Goward’s, and SHE wants me to have paid maternity leave.