Colleen Harkin On The Rita Panahi Show Sky News Australia – 8 April 2025

In this interview, Colleen Harkin appeared on The Rita Panahi Show – Sky News Australia to discuss the IPA’s research on education.

All media appearances posted onto the IPA website are directly related to the promotion and dissemination of IPA research.

Below is a transcript of the interview.

Rita Panahi:

Welcome back. Joining me now is Institute of Public Affairs Research fellow and Director of the IPA Schools programme, Colleen Harkin. Let’s start with the University of Queensland, where senior lecturer, Danny Linder, has berated first-year law students after she supposedly witnessed tens of students walking out of a previous lecture when she started talking about indigenous Australian legal history. Let’s listen to some of what she had to say.

Dani Linder:

What I’m not going to tolerate no matter what your politics are, is any form of discrimination, particularly when it’s directed at me and my cultural identity as an Aboriginal woman. I am an expert in the field. I’m recognised internationally and nationally for the work that I’ve done, and I’m a close co-cordinator with authority to run this subject the way in which I see fit. The way in which I see fit is in alignment with the Council of Australian Law Deans and their approach to Indigenising, and their commitment to indigenising the curriculum.

Rita Panahi:

Now, Colleen, she told the students she would remember their faces, and they better watch themselves because this could be impacting the academic results. After all, she’s going to determine how well they do in this course.

Colleen Harkin:

It’s appalling Rita, the fact that the irony of this is that her area of expertise is the Foundations of Law, and she’s a lawyer herself and she’s threatening students. So, where does that fit into the framework of actually the Rule of Law and what it means to implement the law fairly to everybody? My personal view is that she should be stood down. She’s threatening students that, unless they actually agree with her, she’s indigenising a curriculum that is not really related to actually legal studies. As you said, these people have got really good scores in their ATAR. They have a right to a proper education,

Rita Panahi:

Yeah, and we are seeing this sort of activism across the board, whether kids are studying medicine, studying law. It seems to be infecting every area on campus. If your grades are dependent on lecturers like this, if they object to your political positions, if they don’t like your politics, then that could impact your score potentially, and your career prospects.

Colleen Harkin:

Completely. You are very exposed to their sensitivity, whatever their sensitivity happens to be. Our research showed that we did an audit of the teacher training. About a year and a quarter of teacher training is woke material-

Rita Panahi:

Oh my god.

Colleen Harkin:

… where indigenous curriculum is pushed. So, we’ve got people who are being retrained to be uneducated, and they’re the people who are going back into classrooms. This sort of activism within primary, secondary, and university sector is rife.

Rita Panahi:

Absolutely. Now, the Coalition has announced plans to get rid of work activism and ideological agendas in universities through ministerial intervention, in what is taught in courses. Opposition education spokeswoman, Sarah Henderson said she would direct the tertiary quality education and standards agency to take action against the indoctrination of students if the coalition wins the election. Well, how would that work, Colleen? It’s all good and well to have a policy like that, but will it actually be implemented, and will it have any effect on campus level?

Colleen Harkin:

Well, hopefully if Senator Henderson becomes the Minister for Education, hopefully she actually has the courage to see through those statements. Because it’s one thing to save them and then it’s another thing to actually do them. The Coalition was in government for a long time and didn’t make the inroads that they said that they would. So, it is imperative that students have the right to a non-indoctrination environment in the school, and that they get the opportunity to critically analyse and to think for themselves. As I said, I hope she has the courage to actually implement what she’s saying.

Rita Panahi:

You are so right. We’ve had successive coalition terms and they really did very little to tackle this, whether it’s at higher education or primary or secondary school level. Now we are hearing that special equity provisions for student entry into university courses, they’re supposed to be pretty rare occurrences when someone has got a genuine issue that is impacting their ATAR score. But according to fresh data, one in three university applicants are using special access schemes to gain bonus entry points as equity enrollments reach record highs.

Colleen, we’ve got things like, divorce, disability, poverty. They’re amongst the more common equity provisions being claimed, but one in three, it’s almost making the entry score seem irrelevant.

Colleen Harkin:

It’s an extraordinary statistic. Of course there are periods in time where something extraordinary happens during that year, 12-year, and of course special consideration should be given. But the key word there is special consideration. It ought not to be as common as 30% of the population. I personally want to keep my aeroplanes in the air, buildings staying afloat, not buildings afloat, but buildings staying up and in place. I don’t want to have a scenario where we are at risk of the standard of the students. We actually can’t do the job that this diversity, equity, and inclusion process is compromised the whole of society really.

Whatever the course that their students are doing, if they’re not capable of doing this study, they’re simply not capable of doing it-

Rita Panahi:

Absolutely.

Colleen Harkin:

… and we have to be realistic about that.

Rita Panahi:

Now, before you go, the University of Sydney has started hiring a team of academics to help indigenize and decolonize its courses. One of the new roles is going to be a senior education design officer who would be executing transformative curriculum projects aimed at embedding Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge perspectives, texts and media within curricular projects. This sounds very much like what we’re seeing in secondary schools, in primary schools. Why stop there? Why not have it in universities too?

Colleen Harkin:

Correct. The activism in the curriculum is from kindergarten all the way through. They’re just not listening to what the people wanted. We had a referendum, the result was very clear. It sounds to me like they’re trying to push this division by stealth.

Rita Panahi:

Absolutely. Colleen Harkin, thank you so much for your time tonight.

This transcript of Colleen Harkin talking on The Rita Panahi Show – Sky News Australia from 8 April 2025 has been edited for clarity.