By Dr Tim Themi:

The IPA’s Tim Wilson was allowed to dominate on a Q&A panel including the Green’s Adam Bandt, shaming the Humanities & Social Sciences department of Melbourne relative to the intellectual standards properly required of the Tertiary sector.

On a night which saw police outside launch violent assaults on Occupy Melbourne protestors, the Greens member for Melbourne, Adam Bandt, battled vainly for some progressive view point, having recently attended and endorsed the Occupy protest and strongly condemned, in the social media, the police’s sudden regress to barbarism.

But despite a panel littered with academics trained in critical thinking – including lecturers in politics and policy from Melbourne and Monash – there was on display a massive failure to deconstruct the spin offered by Tim Wilson, who was allowed to bind the terms of the debate to the standpoint of the IPA think-tank which pays him to say precisely what he says.

The IPA, or Institute of Public Affairs, is funded by narrow and extreme concentrations of private power, what Occupy protestors are globally referring to as the 1% who not only own and run the world and the policies that direct it – but are also running it into the ground.1

Sadly this was scheduled to remain uncriticised, apparently, while panellists waxed lyrically about the low quality of our general polity, as if this were a causeless phenomenon that somehow just descended upon us one day from beyond the stars.

Then, as is usually the way with such performance pieces dressed-up, marketed as academic events, one panellist thought to mention that maybe it was “we” the apathetic, fragmented public that was to blame. The question thence was put to the audience, and it was left to me to grab the mike on behalf of the screams outside of a freshly bashed protest.

It’s the Corporation which perverts our democracy. They own the media. They are the media. But apart from some valiant efforts by Adam Bandt, the Graduate School of Humanities & Social Sciences of the University of Melbourne seemed utterly afraid to name it.

To let a willing audience suffer the spin and sophistry of an IPA lightweight and corporate valet like Tim Wilson – who often appears on that ABC News 24 channel that no social activist could ever take seriously – was to commit to the flames the very analytic skills that academics are meant to develop and impart to help us defend the public good against private tyrannies.

Tim Themi is a PhD in Philosophy & Psychoanalytic Studies from the School of International & Political Studies of Deakin University, Burwood and Geelong. He also holds honours degrees in Philosophy from La Trobe and the Engineering Sciences from Melbourne. His doctoral dissertation brought together the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche on the question of desire and ethics. He is also a committed activist at large and in the social media (https://www.facebook.com/people/Tim-Themi/100000389779622)

Tags: occupy melbourne, q&a, tim themi