Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I will speak to amendment (9) and amendment (13), which is coming up shortly, for the convenience of the House and to avoid having to repeat my remarks. Everyone who says that they support academic freedom and that they support Australia's independence in this Asian century will very soon have a chance to vote for it, because this bill, if it gets through in the form proposed by the government, will hamper research, hamper academic freedom and hamper our independence. Even worse, we are about to be asked to strip out of this bill a key protection that was inserted into it after the coalition moved an amendment that the Greens supported in the Senate.

This bill has a very wide scope. It catches research that is being conducted in connection with a list known as the defence and strategic goods list. It can be equipment, the nature of the research or the people with whom one is coming into contact that can potentially overlap with this list. This list has an index of 79 pages and is in itself a 380-page technical document. If your research overlaps with something on that list, you are caught by the bill. If that is the case, it is not simply that there are a few hoops you have to jump through. If your research is caught by this bill and you do not comply with the provisions of it, you face criminal penalties as a researcher in this country. You have to ask for a permit to have your research published.

It also affects the basic conduct of research itself—your communications with people in another country. It will affect you when people come from another country to visit you. If you collaborate with an institute in Asia, you will be caught by this. You are subject to criminal penalties if you do not comply with the requirements of this bill, which themselves are only understandable by reference to a 380-page technical document.

This is not some abstract point; this is going to affect research done all the time by people in this country. As the University of Sydney told the Senate, it will affect it will affect quantum physics research. One academic there said that this would be an onerous regulatory regime requiring allocation of the significant resources to monitoring and managing the requirements that would otherwise be devoted to research. He said:

Were this legislation in place at the time I was brought to Australia from the US to build a research effort in this area, I may not have come, given the potential difficulties it could cause.

This is not someone who is doing research, writing a blueprint for some weapon that they are about to send to another country; they are doing research in quantum physics. The government may say that this will not affect basic research, that it is only research done with an intended purpose. Having spent some time talking to researchers over many years, I know that so much of the research is done now in connection with a potential application and inventions like Wi-Fi come when you are researching something completely different, as CSIRO knows all too well. It is absolutely correct when the University of Sydney says that this will affect potentially melanoma research. One research says:

There would be a chilling effect on participation by foreigners in our biomedical research, and the probability that important research in human biology and medicine might never be done. There would be increased compliance costs, with resulting reduced effectiveness of Commonwealth research infrastructure funding, reduced effectiveness of private funding to independent research institutes, and slowing of research. In the health research sector it has been robustly demonstrated that investment saves lives and increases welfare, so a reduction of investment through increased costs, or non-approval of research, will have a real and potentially quantifiable cost in lives and human welfare.

And they tell us it will have an effect with respect to infectious diseases. Not only is that a laborious process of identifying whether or not you are caught by this act by reference to another document— (Extension of time granted)

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