public personal library

On the lessons came, thick and fast throughout that spring and summer, dealing one blow after another. They didn’t all come from animals. I began to get anonymous hate mail – emails and comments on my blog – from someone in America who had discovered that I’d once worked for a tobacco company and imagined that it was some big secret and that they were going to ‘out’ me. It had never been a big secret – why would it be? – and I’d talked about it publicly on a number of occasions. But that didn’t prevent the intensity of the unpleasantness, the curious sense of violation added to the isolation I was feeling and the death and dying all around me, from almost toppling me.

The Accord report demonstrated conclusively that the funding mechanisms for both teaching and research at Australian universities are fundamentally broken and totally inadequate. They represent a profound failure in public policy over recent decades. International students have helped meet these entrenched chronic funding gaps: for the betterment of Australian students – meeting the full cost of courses like medicine and dentistry, providing infrastructure for all to use, and allowing Australia to have a quality system of R&D, despite embarrassingly low levels of government and industry R&D expenditure compared to OECD standards.