Stephen Buckle has an op-ed in The Australian that addresses the sad situation of the humanities in Australia---on the road to humanities faculties fit only for a banana republic. He says that the former:

Howard government made no secret of its preference for subjects of a narrowly utilitarian nature and, accordingly, the humanities suffered funding starvation, not to mention open contempt, hence the recurring series of funding crises that afflicted arts faculties: crises engineered by the government and aided by opportunistic university administrations....It may be supposed that the Australian Research Council's grants scheme alleviates the problem. In fact, it exacerbates it.... In effect, then, the grants culture is a backdoor way of radically downgrading most humanities academic positions into full-time teaching positions.

He adds that the:

For the humanities, the largest problem is that the system is deliberately hostile. This is obvious from a simple perusal of the ARC grant application form, which makes it clear that research means team-based research, organised into a hierarchy of chief investigator, co-investigators and research assistants, the whole supported by an equipment and infrastructure budget. This structure makes sense in the sciences but is nonsense in the humanities' world of individualised investigation.Research assistants have their uses, but only up to a point. In the end, one has to read and write things for oneself: humanities research is not fact accumulation but the development and defence of a point of view.