Australia's politics academics should look at themselves before calling the IPA and CIS biased

Having said that, no can reasonably expect any scholarship to lead to universal agreement. There is simply no guarantee that scholars and students will agree to the same policy outcomes in a world where competitive realities remain evident over resources and ideas. As explained by Fish, while it has been argued that the neoconservatives may have downplayed their view of a good versus evil world if they had a more complete knowledge of history and human nature, they (Wolfowitz, Pearle, Kristol, Huntington) would have been as widely read in history, philosophy and the arts as anyone.

But, if the goal of university inquiry is to achieve the highest possible standard on behalf of the public interest, then the strengths and weaknesses of various policy perspectives must be evident with regard to any analysis discussing important policy questions.

In other words, by recognising the strengths and weaknesses of all policy perspectives, humanities analysis need not merely blame the media alone. For example, McKnight and Hobbs (AJPS 2013: 307-319), when examining the "mining tax ad war of 2010"', identify "advocacy advertising as an increasingly prevalent technique used by corporations and lobby groups to influence public policy in Australia" while demanding a "regulatory environment for such campaigns" and research "that might help to safeguard democratic practices".

In reality, as argued by Epstein, academics need to overcome "a considerable degree of intellectual autism" rather than blame factors such as "the economic crisis, the greed of corporations, the indifference of government, and shallow consumerism". Rather than look inward instead by choosing to deal with the texts of the past mostly through "criticism and deconstruction", a more engaging, relevant and future oriented humanities can have greater application to the real world.

My scrutiny of recent AJPS supports Melleuish's claim that recent AJPS articles "do not usually contribute to a narrative that sheds light on the larger, longstanding, structural issues of Australian politics".

Rather, I argue that the AJPS is hardly an academic publication worthy of reading with regard to anyone inquiring about the difficult policy questions of the day. It is a journal that mostly represents biased and narrowly focused scholarship that appeals to a like-minded and small audience hardly ever tested by public scrutiny.