Stephen Smith (Perth, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

Let me go through some of the technical reasons why it does not make sense for this House to do anything other than to support the government's recommendation, which is to not adopt amendment (9) contained in the message from the Senate to insert a new section, proposed section 9A. Then I will respond to some of the comments from the floor.

It is worth bearing in mind, as I said in general terms in my earlier remarks, that the government, in response to the preliminary report from the Senate committee, asked Mr Peacock, the Chief Defence Scientist and the Chief Scientist to engage in consultations and a roundtable. Every one of the recommendations made at that roundtable have been adopted by the government, presented to the Senate and agreed to by the Senate. They are supported by the government on the floor of the chamber today. The suggestion that this has all been done in a great rush is, frankly, hyperbole and overegging it.

The Parliamentary Joint Standing Committee on Treaties recommended more than two years ago that legislation be brought into this parliament ratifying the treaty between the United States and Australia for trade in defence. Everyone at the time recognised that that would open up enormous possibilities for Australian industry, Australian defence industry and Australian education and research. It would open up enormous possibilities, because it means that you would not have to get individual export approval for every access that an Australian company might get to a US foreign material sale so far as defence is concerned.

I know that members have been focusing on the narrow issue of national security considerations in defence export areas, both in terms of the Australian context and in terms of the United States context. But let us just pause and remember for one moment that this treaty has been around for four or five years. The Parliamentary Joint Standing Committee on Treaties recommended ratification. The United States Senate effected ratification nearly two years ago to this day. A draft bill was put out for consultation with interested parties as early as May of 2011. When the preliminary report from the Senate came down earlier this year, I asked Mr Peacock, the Chief Defence Scientist and the Chief Scientist, Mr Chubb, to engage in consultations to address whatever reasonable concerns were expressed at that stage by the university and the research sector. Ever one of the recommendations adopted by the roundtable that was chaired by Professor Chubb, the Chief Scientist who used to be the well-respected vice-chancellor at ANU and who from memory used to chair the G8, has been adopted by the Senate and recommended by me for adoption by the House today.

Indeed, on 11 October, Universities Australia put out a press release saying how pleased they were with the fact that all of those things had been effected. Proposed amendment (9) in the message from the Senate, which I am saying that we should not adopt, was not part of these proposals.

It is a new proposal, found in the Senate. It is not part of these proposals.

On 11 October, Universities Australia, priding itself as the peak body representing Australia's 39 universities, said that they strongly supported those recommendations, all of which have been adopted in the Senate and recommended for adoption here. Today, and this is not said critically, they put out a press release saying that the House should give 'serious consideration, as the Senate has done,' to the amendment in question. I have done that and I have come to the conclusion that to do that would undermine, fundamentally, the basic structure of the bill and would not meet the standards required to ratify the treaty. Also, it goes further than is required to meet the balance between the national security and defence export requirements and freedom of academic research and freedom of research.

The adoption of amendment (9) would fundamentally undermine the fabric of the legislation. Today, Universities Australia said that we should give serious consideration to this issue and that:

The principle that Australian researchers are not disadvantaged compared to other countries will be embedded and refined through the two year pilot and transition period.

One of the strengths of the amendments circulated by the government, adopted by the Senate and presented here, is that the transition phase will allow all of those concerns to be observed, monitored and refined, if and when required. We have a transition period of two years, we have a steering group of industry, research and government representatives, chaired by the Chief Scientist. This group will consider the effect of the controls to ensure that they do strike the appropriate balance, as I have outlined: the balance between meeting our international obligations and academic and research freedom. There will be pilots during the transition period. Those assessments will come back to the minister—whether it is me; it will be the minister of the day. And, importantly, the bill does not include any domestic controls. We are talking here about export, so there is no imposition on research conducted and effected in Australia that is for domestic purposes.

Members have made the point that we should adopt this because amendment (9), the proposed section 9A, puts us on a comparable basis with the United States. That fails to appreciate a fundamental difference between the way in which the United States approaches these matters and the way in which we do. The effect of the amendment, in my view, would be that anyone who is claiming to be conducting fundamental research in Australia would be exempt from the provisions of the bill. That is a far broader effect than the US exemption, which is for fundamental research, but which only applies to research outputs. Research inputs are subject to US export controls. There is no US exception that would allow controlled technology to be exported from the US for fundamental research without US government authorisation. So, to say that this puts us on the same footing as US scientists is wrong, because they apply a fundamentally different approach. What we are doing is using our own law, our own approach and our own system to strike the appropriate balance between effecting the international obligation in ratifying the treaty and the national security requirements of defence exports. At the same time we are balancing that with academic and research freedom. If we have that balance wrong we have the two-year transition to make sure that that can be monitored carefully—pilot programs and a government-industry-academic-research steering group—to look at the effect of these measures in practice.

The bald assertion that somehow on the one hand we are putting ourselves in an inferior position to United States scientists, but that on the other hand we should adopt precisely their measures, misunderstands the fundamentally different nature of the way in which we approach these issues as a jurisdiction or a country, and the way in which the United States does.

To summarise those issues, the notion that we have been seized of these issues at six o'clock tonight is just wrong. This is a treaty proposal that has been floating around for years. The first draft bill emerged in the first half of 2011. There have been two Senate committee inquiries, a preliminary report and a subsequent one. There have been consultations conducted by Mr Peacock, the Chief Defence Scientist and the Chief Scientist, and the bringing forward of recommendations, all of which are recommended for adoption. The amendment in the message from the Senate, which I am recommending to the House we reject, was not part of those proposals. It fails from a fundamental mistaken assumption that the US system is the same as ours. It is not.

The measures before the House, on my recommendation, strike the appropriate balance. If for some reason in practice that is shown to be wrong you have a two-year monitoring pilot program with in-practice capacity to make whatever changes at the margins are required.

The essential and simple choice here is that we either effect legislation of sufficient standard to ratify the treaty, or we do not. To include amendment (9) would diminish the standard of the legislation required to meet the international obligation to ratify the treaty, and on that basis the House should reject it.

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