Sexual harassment & sexual assault make Sydney University residential colleges unsafe for students

“The cultural conditioning of girls as gatekeepers and surrogate mothers is supposed to keep boys in a perpetual state of liberation. They can do as they please and trust that the consequences of their actions will be held against any woman they choose to hurt in the process. This form of gendered entitlement is particularly evident in men who enjoy wealth and privilege, both of which can be found in overbearing quantities on the campuses of residential university colleges.”  [Clementine Ford in The Sydney Morning Herald, 3 December 2017]

Honi Soit, 29 November 2017:

In 2009, amidst allegations of sexual violence at the colleges and the formation of a “Define Statutory” facebook group by St Paul’s students, several students, activists and academics wrote to St Paul’s, urging the college to undertake a wide-scale review of their culture with special attention being paid to sexual assault. This did not happen. Instead, St Paul’s hosted a White Ribbon fundraising dinner.

In 2011, calls for a review into college culture were raised again. Broderick’s review of how women were treated in the Australian Defence Force Academy, which followed an incident where a male cadet livestreamed himself having sex with a female cadet via Skype, recommended that similar reviews be undertaken at university college campuses where the same issues existed.

However, following years of discussion, in 2014 the prospect of a college review was killed off by Group of Eight Universities, including the University of Sydney, amidst concerns for reputational damage.

“I think some of those objections were based on perception of reputational risk,” Dr Damian Powell from the University of Melbourne told the Sydney Morning Herald. 

“The honest answer is it was put in the ‘too hard’ basket.”

According to Funnell, “It was incredibly disappointing when in 2014, the Go8 killed off an earlier attempt to review the colleges. It demonstrated how defensive and reputation-conscious they were.”

Incidents of sexual harassment and bullying continued. In 2016, University of Sydney Union media outlet Pulp revealed instances of slut-shaming at Wesley College, where a widely distributed college publication included a ‘Rack Web’ detailing “inter-college hook-ups”. A week later, Honi detailed ongoing incidents of bullying and sexual harassment across all residential colleges.

Months later, in October 2016, Broderick was engaged by the University of Sydney and all colleges, except for St Paul’s, to undertake a review of college culture, and “evaluate the strengths and challenges of residential life”…..

The Sydney Morning Herald, 30 November 2017:

As many as 32 per cent of women at University of Sydney colleges have experienced sexual harassment and 6 per cent of female college students have experienced actual or attempted sexual assault, with other college students making up the vast majority of perpetrators, a review of college culture has found.

The review, led by former sex discrimination commissioner Elizabeth Broderick, found that sexual misconduct, "hazing" and a problematic drinking culture persist at five of the university's six residential colleges, a number of which have come under fire for repeated incidents of sexual misbehaviour by students.

More than 1000 students from Sydney University's Sancta Sophia, St Andrew's, St John's, Wesley and Women's colleges were surveyed by Ms Broderick's team and more than 630 students were interviewed since October last year, with a 69 per cent participation rate across the five colleges…..

St Paul's College, which initially refused to participate in the review but recently joined the process, is not included in the findings and will receive a separate report in June next year.

Female students from St Andrew's College and Women's College reported some of the highest rates of sexual harassment and actual or attempted sexual assault, with 32 per cent of students at Women's College and 30 per cent of women at St Andrew's College saying they have experienced sexual harassment since starting at college.

At both colleges, 8 per cent of women said they have experienced actual or attempted sexual assault…..

Across all five colleges, 25 per cent of women and 6 per cent of men said they have experienced sexual harassment and 6 per cent of women and 1 per cent of men said they have experienced actual or attempted sexual assault.

Of these, 96 per cent of students who experienced sexual harassment and 73 per cent of students who experienced sexual assault said a fellow student from their college or a different college was the perpetrator.

About 90 per cent of all incidents occurred on college grounds.

The review also found that only 9 per cent of college students who experienced sexual assault and 3 per cent of those who experienced sexual harassment made a formal report.

About 31 per cent of those who experienced sexual assault and 49 per cent of those who experienced sexual harassment did not seek any assistance, the review found, with common reasons including that students "didn't think it was serious enough", "did not think I needed help" or "thought I could sort it out myself".

The review also found that 15 per cent of all college students reported that there was too much focus on drinking alcohol at their college and 13 per cent of students said they have been pressured to drink when they did not want to.

Read the full article here.

The review report Cultural Renewal at the University of Sydney Residential Colleges can be read here.

Australian Attorney-General Senator George Henry 'Soapy' Brandis finally obeys the court

For these reasons I consider that the decision communicated to the applicant by letter dated 13 June 2014 that a practical refusal reason exists because the work involved in processing the request(s) would substantially and unreasonably interfere with the performance of the Attorney-General’s functions should be set aside and, in lieu thereof, I decide that no practical refusal reason under s 24 of the FOI Act exists in relation to the request(s), with the consequence that the request(s) are required to be processed in accordance with the FOI Act. [Dreyfus  and Attorney-General (Commonwealth of Australia) (Freedom of information) [2015] AATA 995 , 22 December 2015]

With Australia’s British High Commissioner Alexander Downer not due to step down his post until around April 2018 and no other acceptable option to mothball the Attorney-General in sight, I fear that Australian voters will have to put up with the undistinguished legal mind Senator George Henry ‘Soapy’ Brandis until at least the next federal general election due sometime between August 2018 and May 2019.

Right now he is probably acting like a bear with a sore head in the corridors of power as, once he was forced to obey legal judgment, his diary entries appear to confirm that he never bothered to consult with any legal assistance services before he took a razor to government funding to that sector.

The Guardian, 20 March 2017:

George Brandis has finally released his ministerial diary and it shows no evidence he met with anyone working in the community legal sector before their funding was cut in the 2014 budget.

He handed his electronic diary to Mark Dreyfus, the shadow attorney general, late on Friday.

It took three years for him to release his diary after Dreyfus made his original freedom of information request.

The move came a week after Dreyfus threatened Brandis that he would push for contempt of court proceedings if Brandis did not release the diary immediately.

“Three years since the original freedom of information (FoI) request was made, and thousands of taxpayer dollars later – George Brandis has finally handed over his diary,” Dreyfus said on Monday.

“While the capitulation represents a victory for common sense, transparency and the principles of FoI, it is also ridiculous that it took such lengths to force the attorney general to comply with an act that sits within his own portfolio.

“In order for the attorney general to fulfil a simple request, it has taken an appeal to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, a hearing in the full court of the federal court, and the threat of contempt.

“It is absurd, and it shows once more Senator Brandis’s unsuitability for the role of attorney general and his contempt for the rule of law.

Labor has been seeking Brandis’s diary since February 2014 to discover what consultation he held before cuts to his portfolio in the 2014 budget.

Dreyfus lodged an FoI request to inspect Brandis’ electronic diary from September 2013 to May 2014.

The Labor frontbencher has had a string of legal wins, with the Administrative Appeals Tribunal rejecting Brandis’s refusal of the request in December 2015 and finding it had to be processed. In September 2016 a full federal court decision upheld the tribunal’s ruling.

But less than two weeks ago, Dreyfus’s lawyers wrote to the Australian government solicitor accusing Brandis of “continued avoidance of his obligation to process” the FoI request because he still hadn’t released his diary.

The letter said that Brandis had had six months since the full federal court decision to process the request but “has continued to behave in a manner that is contemptuous” of the decision and the FoI Act.

It threatened if Brandis did not process the request by 20 March, Labor would seek a court order to set a deadline for the attorney general, after which it could begin contempt of court proceedings.

“No explanation for this delay has ever been proffered nor have we been given any reasons why the application has not been processed,” the letter said.

On Monday, Dreyfus said the saga – which cost taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars – had been a “monumental waste of everyone’s time”.

“What a waste of of taxpayers’ money, of public servants’ time, of the court’s time just because of – apparently – the attorney general’s vanity,” he told ABC radio.

He said it was notable there was no evidence in the diary that Brandis had met with legal assistance services, including Environmental Defenders Offices and Community Legal Centres, before cutting their funding in 2014.

In September 2014 the Productivity Commission found that the federal and governments needed to inject an extra $200 million a year into legal assistance centres to better align the means test, maintain existing frontline services and broaden the scope of legal assistance services; with the majority of funding being the responsibility of the federal government.

Instead the Attorney-General has insisted on cutting funding wherever he could and the fight continues with deans of law schools joining in the push back against Brandis:

On his part Brandis denies the funding cuts and attempts to blame the former Labor federal government (which has not been in power for the last three annual budgets) as well as the states, in his speech to the Bar Association of Queensland Annual Conference on 25 March 2017:

"I've been asked this morning to say a few words about federal matters so I thought I'd take the opportunity to address a matter which I know has been of much interest to the Bar, and which was averted to briefly by the state Attorney and that is the question of the Federal Government's contribution to legal assistance funding. We should never forget that most court proceedings in Australia are conducted in state and territory courts under state and territory law. Appropriately, therefore, it is the governments of the states and territories which are the principal funders of legal assistance in Australia. That is as it should be, even acknowledging, of course, that a very large component of the budgets of state and territory governments is money provided to them by the Commonwealth Government under various Commonwealth grants.

Nevertheless, federal governments of both political persuasions have always acknowledged that there is an important role for the Commonwealth to play in supporting the states in the provision of legal assistance through direct payments to Legal Aid Commissions, to Community Legal Centres, and to Indigenous legal assistance bodies.

With that in mind, I note that in the recent past there have been a number of statements made about the size of the Commonwealth's contribution to the legal assistance sector.

So let me take the opportunity with these remarks this morning to put some facts on the table.

First, to date, there have been no cuts to payments to Community Legal Centres by the Commonwealth Government. It has been claimed by some that the Government is withdrawing $6.8 million annually. That claim is misleading.

That money, to which the state Attorney also referred, was money provided for under a four year program, announced by the previous federal government in the 2013 budget, which was deliberately designed to terminate on 30 June 2017. When that program terminates that money will no longer be available. This is what is being called by some - the "Dreyfus funding cliff".

In spite of those, and other claims, the reality of competing funding priorities and the necessity for budget repair across Government should not obscure the significant support that the Commonwealth provides and to which we are committed to continue to provide."

BACKGROUND

The Guardian, 27 March 2017:

The fight for adequate funding for community legal centres stretches back to 2013. When the Abbott government was elected in September 2013, it used its first mid-year budget update to cut $43.1m for legal assistance services over four years, including $19.6m from community legal centres.

Six months later, in its 2014-15 budget, it cut another $6m from CLCs.

A month later it made one-off grants worth $1.55m to just 14 CLCs. Then in March 2015, following intense community pressure, it reversed some of its 2013-14 budget update cuts, reinstating $12m in funding over two years for the sector.

A few months later, in mid-2015, it signed a new five-year national partnership agreement on legal assistance services. The agreement provided Australia’s 189 community legal centres with $42.2m funding in 2016-17, but that funding drops to $30.1m in 2017-­18, $30.6m in 2018-­19, and $31m in 2019-­20.

The reduction in funding levels from 2016-­17 amounts to $34.83m over three years, 30% of CLC funding.

UNSW Phillip Baxter College residents are sooo sorry they were caught in the act *WARNING: Offensive Language*

Established in 1966 Philip Baxter College is named after UNSW's first Vice-Chancellor who laid the ground work for the university to become the world class institution it is today. It is the largest of the Kensington Colleges and housed 211 student residents and 7 resident academic staff according to The Kensington Colleges website.

On 12 April 2016 ABC News reported this behaviour by a group of Baxter College students:

Students at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) have held a protest after a video emerged of a group of young men from the university's Baxter College singing an offensive song while on an regular "Boys Night Out".

In the video, the young men are heard singing a call and answer song referring to women as "little red foxes" and how they would "shoot them in their boxes".

I wish that all the ladies

Were little red foxes

And if I was a hunter

I'd shoot them in their boxes

I wish that all the ladies

Were buns in the oven

And if I were a baker

I'd cream them by the dozen

I wish that all the ladies

Were holes in the road

And if I was a dump truck

I'd fill them with my load.

UNSW said they were "appalled by the sexist and demeaning attitudes and behaviours" directed towards females in the chant.

The university said it had taken steps to investigate the incident and meetings involving college residents, student representatives and the UNSW SRS Women's Collective were convened on Monday night.

James Dunn is house treasurer of Baxter College and was part of the Boys Night Out.

He admitted he probably took part in the chanting, but now realised it was inappropriate.

"The video is pretty appalling," he told 7.30.

"As a leader of this college and me being a part of the group that was likely in the video, for me it is really personal and I have no idea why I did it.

"I'm sort of condemning my own actions at this time and the actions of everyone in the video."

Mr Dunn said he just accepted the behaviour as part of the Baxter culture when he first moved from his country town for university two years ago.

"I walked into the culture that is Baxter and was taught these chants as part of the culture that we have here and something we do as a night out, as a whole college both males and females," he said.

"It has been ingrained in many college societies for too long that those things can be gotten away with."

When reading the new item two points come to mind.

One is that the University of New South Wales has the lowest female to male student percentages of all Australian universities at 46.1 per cent.

Two is that it is highly likely that the apology printed below is merely code for We’re sorry we got caught bellowing out our misogyny at the top of our lungs on a bus during “Boys Night Out”.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott just demolished one of his latest reasons for proposing deregulation of university fees

This was Prime Minister Tony Abbott being quoted in The Australian on 14 March 2015 concerning his desire to deregulate university fees:

Mr Abbott said just one Australian university was now ranked in the world’s top 50.

“Why not try to get two in the top 20. Unless we take the dead hand of Canberra away that is going to be extremely difficult,” he said.

It seems Mr. Abbott has either not bothered to research the issue and relied on a single recent newspaper report or he is just making things up again because he knows News Corp media is not going to challenge the nonsense he spouts.

The 2014-15 Times Higher Education world university rankings survey (covering 400 universities) lists five Australian universities in the top 100 and two, I repeat two, in the top 50 universities.

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2014-15/world-ranking

In which Australian Education Minister Christopher Pyne's nose grows longer and longer.....

The Australian depiction of Christopher Pyne and his deregulated university course fees

This was the Australian Education Minister Christopher Pyne being interviewed by The Insiders program on 15 March 2015:

Labor of course are the only reason why the crossbenchers are where the action is because Labor's taken themselves out of the conversation by being political opportunists, except of course we now see that they represent an existential threat to universities because of Kim Carr's policy of putting caps back on, paying on outcomes and shutting out low socioeconomic status students from university.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics Education and Work, Australia, May 2014 clearly states that:

Of those engaged in formal study, approximately 1.2 million (40%) were attending a higher education institution….

More than one third (39%) of people aged 15–64 years who were enrolled in a non-school qualification were studying for a Bachelor Degree….

Leaving aside the fact that is was past Labor federal governments which introduced first free university education then later low, no-interest loans to meet the shortfall between government funding of university places and course costs and, even adjusting this attendance figure for overseas students studying in this country, that still leaves an est. 1 million domestic university students of which an est 17.5% are from low socio-economic backgrounds.

In fact, the reason that the percentage stands nationally at an est. 17.5 is because the former Gillard Labor Government uncapped Commonwealth supported student places at Australian universities under the demand-driven system in 2012 and, this led to an immediate 0.5% enrolment increase within twelve months of low socio-economic students [Socio-economic Status of Schools and University Academic Performance: Implications for Australia’s Higher Education Expansion, December 2014]

Some universities can now boast 20% or more students from low-income family backgrounds.

When comparing the percentage of such students in the final years of the Gillard Government with percentages during the Howard Coalition Government, it is clear that numbers being admitted to university from this group were lower during the Howard years – in the first three years the percentage never rose above 14.7% [Socioeconomic Background and Higher Education Participation, 2002] and didn’t reach 16% until the early 2000s.

Mr. Pyne appears to have offered up his strange claims to voters before this.

As Labor’s higher education policy, the Shadow Minister for Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Industry Kim Carr pointed out at a Universities Australia conference on 12 March 2015.

The Minister and some supporters of deregulation have chosen to wilfully misinterpret my past remarks as a signal that Labor intends to impose an enrolment freeze.

Let me categorically reject that claim.

Mr Pyne’s so-called analysis of these claims is based on a lie.

Under Labor, the number of student places will continue to grow. Under Labor, universities will be properly funded.