Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Australian campuses have become the front line in an ideological war with our great trading partner, China. Our universities will have to start reconciling their scholarly values with the political campaigning of their largest customer, China. Recently, President Xi Jinping started to try to return his country to the commanding heights of Chinese education. He told teachers to educate and guide their students to love the motherland, love the people and love the Communist Party of China. Xi Jinping said:

Overseas Chinese have red-hot patriotic sentiment.

The Communist Party's war against liberal values in China and its growing international reach present Australia with a challenge we've not seen before. The challenge for the democratic world is that President Xi's deepening struggle against liberal values in China does not end at their borders. Most challenging for us is that Xi made it clear that his primary enemies are liberal values that undermine his own political system—that's the view of former adviser to Prime Minister Turnbull, John Garnaut, in this week's Financial Review.

How does it affect Australia? Garnaut's great insight is little understood by avaricious university bureaucrats who only want overseas fees from Beijing-approved students. Core institutions like the United Front Work Department are exporting this ideological battle around the world. As I quoted, President Xi said overseas Chinese have red-hot patriotic sentiment, and Beijing's ministry for education has issued new instructions to its councillors and diplomatic missions around the world:

Build a multidimensional contact network linking home and abroad—the motherland, embassies and consulates, overseas student groups, and a broad number of students.

As Garnaut argues—and the Lowy Institute has as well—there are great challenges in our Australian universities because of this. In recent months, we have seen denunciations of Australian university lecturers who have offended Beijing's patriotic sensibilities. A lecturer at the ANU was excoriated on Chinese language social media for insensitively displaying the warning: 'I will not tolerate students who cheat.' A lecturer at the University of Sydney was castigated for using an online map which, if you looked extremely closely, showed an Indian demarcation of the Himalayan border.

There can be no doubt of the pressure on universities to fill classrooms with full fee-paying students, generate private donations and rise up the research rankings. But, as Garnaut argues, to manage these risks, our universities will need to reach out to alienated students, fix the failures of integration and improve their products. They'll need a full spectrum of resilience strategies to shore up vulnerabilities and uphold the principles of open and critical inquiry upon which they are built. Most of all, they'll have to look at what the Beijing authorities are doing on their campuses, on our Australian campuses, and do a better job of hearing what they say.

Alex Joske, a student at the ANU, recently cemented what Mr Garnaut has said, saying that the Chinese Communist Party exploits this isolation of students that he met at the ANU. He said that dissenting students fear speaking out because of the further isolation they may face if their fellow Chinese students rule them persona non grata. It means they hardly come into contact with the ideas that underline the great democratic society of Australia. Some campus societies have a mentality that exacerbates the divide between students from the mainland and local students. It encourages them to consider anyone who deviates from the party line as the enemy.

Recently, we had a disgraceful national luxury car protest of Bentleys, Lamborghinis and Maseratis driving past an Indian Independence Day celebration with provocative slogans targeting Chinese patriotic sentiment, including the slogan: 'Anyone who threatens China will be killed.' These kinds of sentiments are intolerable. We welcome overseas students to Australia. They've been on university campuses ever since I was at university—and that's a long time ago! We need to make sure that they can operate in freedom and that they are not overly arm-twisted by embassies or consulates.

We've also had the problem of donations—that was in the Herald Sun. When you overlay this with the purchase of nearly all of the Chinese language press in Australia and the funding of faux think-tanks, you can clearly see Beijing's wish to intervene in Australian foreign policy. This well-funded donation strategy, the campus strategy, shows a prolonged influence operation by Beijing. It's a distinct issue from how Australians should view Chinese investment by people and entities on the mainland in Australia. We should have a colour-blind attitude to Chinese investment. But we should have a separate and different debate on the various political influence operations in Australia.