{"id":89439,"date":"2025-03-25T05:47:00","date_gmt":"2025-03-25T10:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=89439"},"modified":"2025-03-25T05:48:34","modified_gmt":"2025-03-25T10:48:34","slug":"doge-making-australia-australian-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=89439","title":{"rendered":"DOGE: Making Australia Australian Again"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I’ll admit it – two months of DOGE has made me a little inured to stories about outlandish things that the Federal Government spends our\u00a0<\/em>money on. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Promoting DEI in Serbia? \u00a0 Transgender comic books in Peru? \u00a0Yaaawn<\/a>. \u00a0 Get back to me when you’ve got something interesting. \u00a0<\/p>\n

So when I heard that there was a fracas about funding universities in Australia, a part of me thought of course there is. \u00a0 Why would we not be funding universities in Oz<\/em>?”<\/p>\n

What I didn’t figure on was that there would be so much of it the risk of losing it would cause a national emergency down under. \u00a0The Trump administration is asking seven\u00a0<\/em>Australian universities, not to do without all that American aid money, but to justify the aid money they are getting, in terms of American nationional interest<\/em>. \u00a0According to the Guardian<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

The Trump administration told Australian university researchers a push to promote administration priorities and avoid \u201cDEI, woke gender ideology and the green new deal\u201d was behind a \u201ctemporary pause\u201d of funding, according to a memo seen by Guardian Australia.<\/p>\n

University sector sources say the US has severed research funding at six universities \u2013 Monash University, Australian National University (ANU) and the University of Melbourne, University of Sydney, University of New South Wales and University of Western Australia \u2013 since Donald Trump came to power, including some as early as January. ANU is the first university to publicly acknowledged it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Which is, according to Sky News<\/a>, an urgent enough matter that Australian PM Tony Albanese is being urged to drop everything and get on the case:<\/p>\n

\n

A memo sent by the US office of managament and budget to an Australian university project on January 27 and retrieved by The Guardian, declared financial assistance for the researchers was a waste of taxpayer money and explained federal spending priority would go towards “the will of the American people”.<\/p>\n

\u201cFinancial assistance should be dedicated to advancing Administration priorities, focusing taxpayer dollars to advance a stronger and safer America, eliminating the financial burden of inflation for citizens, unleashing American energy and manufacturing, ending \u2018wokeness\u2019 and the weaponization of government, promoting efficiency in government, and Making America Healthy Again,\u201d the memo said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The cuts would leave a $600M hole in Australian research budgets.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And if you guessed some Ozzie academics would refer to Americans wantintg American money to serve American interests as “foreign interference” – well, you’ve been paying attention this past four years<\/a> (and you know that public unions are pretty much the same around the world):<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cThe Federal Government must push back on the Trump administration\u2019s blatant foreign interference in our independent research in the strongest possible terms.\u201d \u2013 Alison Barnes, NTEU National President

Read the full media release here \ud83d\udc49 https:\/\/t.co\/vUg4if1lJw<\/a>@AlisonBarnes25<\/a> pic.twitter.com\/rGDB2mUIlY<\/a><\/p>\n\u2014 NTEU (@NTEUnion) March 13, 2025<\/a><\/blockquote>\n

\n

The National Tertiary Education Union’s (NTEU) national president Alison Barnes slammed the missive, and said the Albanese government had to “guarantee Australian researchers would be protected.” “The federal government must push back on the Trump administration’s blatant foreign interference in our independent research in the strongest possible terms,” she said.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Not to mix my metaphors, but “the first three weeks of a new diet are the. hard part” seems appropriate under the circumstances. \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ll admit it – two months of DOGE has made me a little inured to stories about outlandish things that the Federal Government spends our\u00a0money on. \u00a0 Promoting DEI in Serbia? \u00a0 Transgender comic books in Peru? \u00a0Yaaawn. \u00a0 Get back to me when you’ve got something interesting. \u00a0 So when I heard that there […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[324,321,10,367],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-89439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-education","category-big-left","category-education","category-trump"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=89439"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89439\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":89440,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89439\/revisions\/89440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=89439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=89439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=89439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}