What’s the latest from Ramsay (Centre) Street, the latest political soap opera taking Australia by storm?

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Think tanks!

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Be a little underhanded

For reactionary ends!

Well, folks, when last you tuned in, Harold (John Howard) was trying to set up a Methodist Information Centre in the high school, after being left a bequest by Mrs Mangel. Toadfish (Tony Abbott) — yes, I haven’t watched Neighbours since 2002 — was an enthusiastic supporter, but, oh Toady, you’re such a klutz, and spilt Harold’s leaflets about how sex leads to dancing.

Scott (Greg Sheridan) – because you haven’t watched Neighbours since 1991 – said it was all for the best, and maybe they should set up at Our Lady of Perpetual Mastication, under the kindly guidance of Natalie Imbruglia (Greg Craven). Scott said he’d run a story in the Happy Shopper magazine. And the plot played out for nine months.

Yes, it now seems that there’s a full court press from one faction of the Ramsay Centre backers to steer it away from a secular public university and into the loving arms of the Catholic system. Doubtless, this is simply a matter of appearances and everyone has been utterly honest throughout.

But if you were to read it through the lens of, say, Darkness at Noon, you’d say that there was a split between the Catholic-European-kultur side, led by Abbott, and the Anglican-Anglo-Saxon-Burkean side, led by John Howard. It was Howard who pioneered the US Centre for Information on America (usually called the US Studies Centre) at Sydney Uni. The right thinks it’s a failure, totally captured by the left. To most of us, the US Studies Centre seems to have had the effect that Howard wanted, to put a centre with a generally pro-American focus at the heart of the uni system, and contest the significant amount of material that is anti-imperialist. That’s in line with Howard’s comparatively practical conservatism.

Abbott’s contribution to the spruiking of the Ramsay Centre has been to tie it repeatedly to Cecil Rhodes — at a time when English universities have been consumed by campaigns to remove statues of the old slave-master — and say that the centre must limit the discussion of Western civilisation (“it must be for it”). The ANU duly dropped the centre.

Then, in quick succession, Abbott’s old wing-man Greg Sheridan wrote two pieces saying that the public universities are no longer places for such a centre, and up jumped Australian Catholic University vice-chancellor Greg Craven to say that ANU was “gutless” to knock back the Ramsay. Doubtless all spontaneous, but it certainly seems that the Catholic system is signalling its willingness to take a walk down Ramsay Street.

The Australian Catholic University is a strange beast; it teaches us about Western civilisation by being run like Rome under the Borgias. From small beginnings, it has become a multi-campus operation; Greg Craven on over a $1 million/year package is not merely the second highest paid vice-chancellor in Australia; he is better remunerated than the President of Harvard. That’s your taxes at work, because the ACU is thoroughly integrated into the student funding system, and the idea that it represents some rock of value standing apart from the secular horde is a bit of a crock: people in the humanities move back and forth between the ACU and the public system and publish the same sort of “Shaving the (I)ce: Queering professional curling” sort of papers people do in the humanities everywhere.

Will the ACU, sighing heavily, now invite the Ramsay to make an application, since the secular public beast has turned away, etc, etc? We’ll watch with interest. You’d have to presume that Howard is either in on all of this, or now a target. Inside the Ramsay, it’s possibly like the time when Toady borrowed Alan Dale’s bike and the tyre was flat later. Or like when Stalin had Bukharin shot. Choose your own adventure. You’d have to presume that current Ramsay CEO Simon Haines is on borrowed time, and will get the heave-ho soon.

Meanwhile National Tertiary Education Union branches and staff at catholic universities will have to get interested. The Ramsay Centre’s mission, as stated by Abbott, is still a travesty of the university. It has to be resisted. The right appears to think that attacking the Islamic Studies Centre sponsored by the Dubai, etc, governments is a quid pro quo. Actually, I couldn’t be happier. Let’s have a Senate inquiry into private funding of public universities in Australia, and set new guidelines.

O-o-o think tanks

When someone blows their cover

That’s when think tanks, get

Housed in sheds

(A Grundy Production)