The Communications Law Centre at UNSW will close down on 30 June 2005 after the university refused to renew its core funding. The Centre has been at UNSW since 1988, and is one of the few genuinely independent voices on a wide range of issues including media ownership, telecommunications regulation, censorship and privacy, providing valuable input to policy debate from a public interest perspective.

In a year when such an independent voice is surely needed (media ownership deregulation, the new merged communications regulator, digital television reviews, Telstra privatisation), it seems very shortsighted of UNSW to pull the plug. The CLC in Melbourne, hosted by Victoria University, is not affected by this decision.