Academics have accused the education minister of “arbitrary political interference” in the Australian Research Council after requesting the body’s board investigate the fellowship of a prominent academic and Palestinian advocate.
Randa Abdel-Fattah, the recipient of an ARC Future Fellowship and an academic at Macquarie University, has faced sustained criticism from the Coalition, some Jewish bodies and media outlets for a series of controversial comments, including alleging Zionists had “no claim or right to cultural safety”, and posting “May 2025 be the end of Israel” in the new year and changing her profile picture to a picture of a Palestinian paratrooper after the 7 October attacks.
On 31 January, the education minister, Jason Clare, wrote to the ARC board requesting they investigate her $870,000 research grant, commissioned to research Arab and Muslim-Australian social movements, as a “matter of priority”.
It followed a speech by Abdel-Fattah at an anti-racism symposium headed by the Queensland University of Technology’s Carumba Institute, where she revealed she had refused an ARC requirement to hold an academic conference as a condition of her grant, instead inviting women to contribute revolutionary quotes.
Abdel-Fattah said she did not want to fulfil her ARC grant requirements in a “traditional way”.
“Part of my funding is to hold a traditional academic conference, and I thought, ‘No, I’m not going to do that’,’’ she said.
“I took some of the funding, and instead of holding a conference, I did … a Jars for Preservation workshop, where I invited women … of all different backgrounds … to send me their most beloved quotes from their warriors, their feminist women, their scholars, people who have inspired them and given them that revolutionary zeal and nourished them.
“I printed it out in coloured paper, everybody got a jar, and we sat down as a workshop and we cut.”
Abdel-Fattah’s project is described as the first study of “a neglected but constitutive part of Australia’s social movement history: Arab/Muslim-Australian social justice activism”, building new knowledge about how the community has “struggled against external systems and internal conflicts to build a socially just future in multicultural Australia”.
Clare said grant recipients were “required to follow the rules” set out in their agreements. “The government has asked the ARC Board to ensure that this is the case,” he said.
But the president of the Australian Historical Association, Michelle Arrow, said Clare’s directive represented a “new kind of political interference” in ARC grants.
In November 2023, Clare introduced legislation that would prevent ministers from approving competitive grants, after a review into the body found trust had been “dramatically eroded” by controversial grant decisions made by former Coalition ministers.
The review called for more “checks and balances” on the power of ministerial intervention, limited to “the extraordinary circumstance of a potential threat to national security”.
Clare said at the time any future minister who tried to politicise the ARC would be subject to the scrutiny of parliament, adding the body had been “bedevilled by political interference” which had “damaged our international reputation”.
Arrow said in directing the ARC to investigate Abdel-Fattah, Clare had created “a new form of arbitrary political interference in research” that was “seemingly triggered by an opposition and media campaign against an academic, and directed at a project already funded and in progress”.
The general secretary of the National Tertiary Education Union, Damien Cahill, has written to the ARC chair, Peter Shergold, seeking assurances the process has not been influenced by “external forces”, including media corporations.
“The independence of the ARC is paramount and neither politicians nor any other external parties should be directing its priorities,” he wrote. “Australia’s future will suffer if research grants become political footballs.”
The head of legal at the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, Simone Abel, said there should be “no question marks” about whether taxpayer money was being used to create “culturally unsafe spaces” at universities, adding it was “entirely appropriate” for the ARC to carry out an investigation.
On Wednesday evening, an open letter condemning Clare’s interference in the ARC had been signed by almost 700 Australian academics, including more than 50 at Macquarie University.
The letter said Palestinian, First Nations and anti-racism academics had been subjected to “particularly damaging campaigns that aim to end their careers” and silence criticism of Israel’s actions, adding Abdel-Fattah’s research project had been subject to “rigorous peer review”.
The opposition education spokesperson, Senator Sarah Henderson, has been lobbying the ARC to cancel Abdel-Fattah’s research fellowship since April last year, when the academic conducted an excursion with children to the University of Sydney’s pro-Palestine encampment.
“This research fiasco shows Labor’s decision to remove ministerial discretion from taxpayer-funded research grants was grossly irresponsible and not in the national interest,” she posted to X this month.
The Greens deputy leader and spokesperson for higher education, Senator Mehreen Faruqi, said Clare’s decision was not just an attack on “one individual, but on the very principles of free speech, anti-racism and human rights”.
The vice-chancellor of Macquarie University, Prof Bruce Dowton, defended his university’s response to concerns raised over Abdel-Fattah at a parliamentary inquiry into antisemitism earlier this month.
He said he did not agree “on a personal level” with Abdel-Fattah’s controversial comments accusing Zionists of having no rights to cultural safety, but the university addressed concerns by urging staff to “restrain themselves” and comply with university policies.
“We do have regard … about the rights, and … privileges of academic staff, around freedom of speech and academic freedom,” he said. “The definition of anti-Zionism is ultimately a matter for the law on which the law is silent.”
A spokesperson for the ARC said it was engaging as a “matter of priority” with Macquarie University to ensure it was properly managing the grant and was separately conducting a “thorough investigation”.
“The ARC has significant concerns about recent comments made by the researcher regarding the conduct of the research project,” they said.
