Australian government signals sustained spotlight on security

Australian universities cannot expect any let-up to the political pressure over their vulnerability to foreign interference, notwithstanding the election of a government seen as more sympathetic to the sector than its predecessors.

Education minister Jason Clare has said he will respond “shortly” to a March report from the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, which called for the already considerable regulation of universities’ foreign activities to be increased.

The report, from a committee with almost equal representation from the two main political parties, was released in the shadow of the May federal election. Its 27 recommendations included an audit of 10 years of research grants for signs of “exposure” to foreign talent programmes, and the potential revocation of some universities’ defence industry accreditations.

The committee’s then chair said a “sustained campaign of intimidation, harassment, censorship and intelligence gathering” at universities had resulted in safety threats to students and the “transfer of sensitive research to authoritarian regimes”.

The committee asked for annual updates on universities’ adherence to the revised University Foreign Interference Taskforce (UFIT) guidelines, complete with “classified” briefings on the task force’s methods for evaluating compliance with the guidelines.

Mr Clare said he had met the UFIT steering group recently and pledged to work with universities in implementing the guidelines. He told university chancellors that foreign interference and cybersecurity were the “right problems” for them to be addressing. “They’re big issues and they’re core issues,” he told the National Conference on University Governance.

Chief defence scientist Tanya Monro said the sector had “pockets of excellence” in its management of security issues. “But I don’t see systemic ways of spreading that culture across our universities,” she told the conference.

“We assume that we can keep more sensitive research…separated from research that’s less sensitive, and it really doesn’t work. We need to be having those really tough conversations, at a researcher-to-researcher level, of what we need to do to change the way we do our research, to provide some of those protections.”

Professor Monro, a renowned photonics expert and former deputy vice-chancellor of the University of South Australia, said the risk was “not that we lose an edge, but that our own edge can be turned against us”.

“One of my fears is…it’ll actually be in Australia’s interests to not work in certain areas in case our own knowledge is turned against us.”

Karen Andrews, who served as science minister in the previous government before moving into the home affairs portfolio, said the ministerial change had been an “enormous eye-opener”.

“Moving into that role, I learned a lot about the risks that Australia was facing from other nations around the world. I’d have liked to have had that knowledge when I was working in industry, science and technology, because it would have given me an entirely different perspective on some of those issues,” she said.

She said “state actors” looking to procure information or influence research did not confine their attention to the researchers. “They could go to their families. They could go to other people who are working in the area. [That] became patently obvious when I moved into the role of home affairs, and my family started to get briefings on security issues for their own sake.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com