Howard and Costello: a difference of opinion. Crikey doesn’t want to further fan the flames of the Liberal leadership, but it’s pretty clear that John Howard and Peter Costello have a fundamental difference of opinion over their election abilities.

According to The Bulletin, Costello said in 2005:

He (Howard) can’t win; I can. We (the Government) can, but he can’t.

And according to page 238 the Van Errington biography of the Prime Minister, the Treasurer wanted a double dissolution election to pass a purer GST with no exemptions for food but:

Howard would have none of it. He knew the government could not win a second election selling the GST and began wondering if Costello had the political nous to win elections.

Silence on academic censorship. Free speech campaigners are closely watching the case of two Queensland University of Technology academics punished for criticising what they regarded as an offensive PhD thesis, but there’s an ominous silence from officialdom. Gary MacLennan and John Hookham objected to the thesis title Laughing at the Disabled: Creating Comedy that Confronts, Offends and Entertains. They ended up being suspended without pay for six months and are now taking their case to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. Former Queensland academic Ross Fitzgerald unpacked the issue in The Australian yesterday:

MacLennan and Hookham’s quest for justice at QUT is no mere local dispute… Decades of so-called institutional reforms, coupled with cuts to university funding, have given rise to the corporate university, which eagerly seeks contacts with industry and the free market. Instead of universities being institutions that thrive on debate and dissent, we have the university as a corporate entity where academics who question the university’s mission are regarded as corporate traitors, to be hounded out of the workplace…

It’s not just an issue for academia. It’s a much broader matter of free speech. MacLennan and Hookham objected to the topic and the research involved. They have been punished for expressing their views. And we haven’t heard a peep out of the Federal or Queensland Education Ministers – or their shadows.