Welcome aboard: Professor Frank Bongiorno and UC vice-chancellor Bill Shorten. Photos: UC.
Bill Shorten has been in the bearpit of politics and seen any number of ideas shot down in the partisan environment of Parliament and the campaign trail.
Now University of Canberra vice-chancellor, Mr Shorten wants to fight back against the corrosive polarisation of politics and provide a venue and vessel for the discussion of political ideas, rooted in the study of history.
He has even lured a “maquee player” away from the Australian National University to head up the Vice-Chancellor’s Centre of Public Ideas (COPI), with the appointment of historian Professor Frank Bongiorno as its inaugural director.
Professor Bongiorno will take up the Donald Horne Professorship, named after the former UC Chancellor and leading Australian journalist, editor, academic, historian and public intellectual who coined the ironic term “The Lucky Country”.
Mr Shorten said the new centre would be a lean but effective institution at UC that would also benefit from a “foreign legion” of past politicians and political journalistic luminary Michelle Grattan, adding their experience and expertise to give students practical insight into the political process.
The centre will build on UC’s research and teaching capabilities across its Faculties of Business, Government and Law, and Arts and Design, and complement the work of UC’s Centres of Deliberative Democracy and Creative and Cultural Research.
“There is a dissatisfaction in the nation with extreme partisanship,” Mr Shorten said.
“There is an opportunity to look at history, applied politics, and see how we can not constantly, politically as a class, have the memory of goldfish, where everything seems new and every crisis seems it’s never had any antecedents.
“This is an opportunity to step above the day-to-day partisanship. There is a hunger in this country for long-term thinking, but the best long-term thinking can only come in form from the study of history and the applied lessons.”
Mr Shorten said there was a lot of goodwill from people from all sides to be part of a place where ideas can be discussed.
He said Professor Bongiorno brought a particular discipline of applied politics and history, a combination that would have an exponential benefit for students who wanted to learn about politics of any age and how to get things done, something that would set UC apart.
The new centre was another reason to choose UC, as an undergraduate school-leaver or a public servant wanting to augment their skills, Mr Shorten said.
Professor Bongiorno wants to create a space where people feel safe to exchange ideas.
Professor Bongiorno said there was a real call for this kind of institution, especially in the nation’s capital.
“This is a period in which democracies are in decay, it would seem around the world, and in which Australia, for all its problems, is still really in a position to make a valuable contribution to those global debates about democracies, about policy, about how you maintain social cohesion,” he said.
Professor Bongiorno was particularly interested in the concept of a historical hinterland for informed decision-making.
He said that a lack of institutional and policy memory meant that long-term thinking was often missing.
“It’s been a complaint for a long time, the lack of institutional memory, the lack of a sense of historical background and context, the kind of assumption at times that decision makers have a blank piece of paper or a blank slate, and all they need to do is write on it and everything will be OK,” he said.
“That’s not how decision-making works in any context.”
Professor Bongiorno said polarisation could partly be a result of not really understanding that sense of historical context.
“We’ll be trying to promote decision-making as a complex exercise, and we’re really keen to assist students to be prepared for a life of both good citizenship and success in the professions that recognise those realities,” he said.
Professor Bongiorno envisioned the new centre as a space for civil discourse, where people felt welcome to contribute to debates, where there was room for disagreement, and where individuals felt safe to exchange ideas.
As the 50th anniversary of the Dismissal nears, Professor Bongiorno said that seismic event and its unfinished constitutional business would definitely be on the agenda.
He said it was a topic that students loved, saying its ability to engage students’ interests and imaginations was undiminished.
“I would imagine that I’d be teaching the intricacies, the electrical wiring of that particular event to students over here, in the years ahead,” Professor Bongiorno said.
“I’ve been re-researching aspects of it recently for the anniversary and that’ll be among the many topics in Australian political history I’ll be delighted to canvas over here.”
The centre’s activities will include undergraduate education, short courses and microcredentials designed for current decision-makers, as well as lectures, podcasts, publications and seminars.
Mr Shorten said UC had gone through the pain of stabilising its finances and now was the time to rebuild with this new centre.
Professor Bongiorno will take up the role in February.
