When a review of Commonwealth funding of “strategic policy work”, together with the government’s response, was released just before Christmas, the howls from associates of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute were probably audible on the Moon.

A former director of ASPI, Peter Jennings, was among the first out of the blocks with an article in The Australian newspaper brimming with dudgeon. Jennings was touched up in the review report because it said that as director he had “over-reached” and “veered into partisan commentary” out of line with ASPI’s “non-partisan charter” to the “detriment” of its “reputation”.

Jennings didn’t refute these findings, saying it was “better to over-reach than under-reach”, while claiming “a friend” reckoned his writing was “piquant”.

So what’s to be made of this sampler from Jennings’s note on the funding review? He describes as “a hit job” to “kill ASPI”, one that will “help the government shut down informed and independent commentary”. He says that the “idea that a think tank should offer ‘contestability’ of policy advice is dead in Canberra” and that “the bureaucracy” and the government are happy “to let the Institute die a slow death from strangulation.” And all this in the face of Jennings’s unevidenced claim that ASPI research “on China changed policy thinking in Washington DC, London, Tokyo and elsewhere…”.

It would surely take a “friend” to see tendentious, hyperbolic guff........

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