For five days, the Australian representative to the 2026 Venice Biennale was to be the first ever Arab-Australian artist selected for this honour.

Australian ecologists and ecology scientists are reporting increasing levels of interference, intimidation, and straight-out misrepresentation of their views by forces outside of science. Their press releases are being altered to fit policy positions, and sometimes even academic papers and conference papers are constrained by management, or fear or losing funding. Fear of being misrepresented in the media – and the flow-on effects for their work – is also high.

No-one, except our political opponents, particularly cares about, or is monitoring, our consistency on free speech. The consistency that does matter to people is about substantive political content – whose side we’re on, which causes we defend, what reforms we’re campaigning for. What makes the positions of the left consistent is, quite simply, the political goals they embody.

As the entire workplace of the university has become more contingent, the protections fought for over decades by both students and academics – protections from the government, the public, and indeed from each other – have evaporated almost by stealth.

If that is the context, what concerns me here comes from three separate stories, all of which broke this week. The first is the Liberal Party dinner hosted by Channel 9 in their studios. This was a $10,000 per head event on the Sunrise set, where guests from property, banking and mining could pay to hear Scott Morrison speak.

The outcome of the High Court of Australia case of Comcare v Banerji has been touted as the death knell for freedom of speech in Australia. It’s hard for something to die that was never really alive in the first place, but the decision remains deeply alarming.

The Code of Conduct, the Student Discipline Rule and the investigative processes that are set in motion after a student is suspected of breaking either are familiar enemies to left-wing students at the University of Sydney.

The real threat to liberty of expression and inquiry on campus comes from the unconstrained power of senior university management to accept strings-attached funding, dismiss staff, discipline students and ban speakers.