Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

If I heard that last contribution correctly, it has only served to deepen my misgivings about the foundations of this piece of legislation—the real rationale—because, when speakers on the other side of this chamber talk about the agreements that states and territories have entered into, they've only got one state in mind and one institution. There's nothing that senators on the other side or members in the other place have got to say about the agreement that the Northern Territory government reached with a Chinese company to lease the port of Darwin for 99 years. There's nothing about the previous Belt and Road Initiative agreements that the Commonwealth signed in 2017. There's no reflection on the previous comments by the now Leader of the House and other senior members of the government supporting those arrangements. It's only an assault on the Victorian government, with, as far as I can see it, very little foundation sitting behind the political logic of this bill, Australia's Foreign Relations (State and Territory Arrangements) Bill 2020, and a related bill.

As is so often the case, this is a government that misdiagnoses the problem, misconceives the solution and is deeply directionless on such an important issue of national interest. It's an issue that requires consistency in approach. It's an issue that requires more voices, not fewer, coming from Australia. It requires deeper engagement from all levels of government across the public sector and business to business from our private sector, NGOs and people to people. The primacy of the Commonwealth on external affairs is not challenged by anybody in this place. We say that, if the Commonwealth government have a primary role, they should lead and provide leadership. So far, they have been incapable of doing that. So far, they have been incapable of articulating a plan to put Australia in the best position in our region, in the strongest position for our national interest.

It should be straightforward to construct a proper understanding of the national interest here. It requires, at all levels of government and in our institutions, a culture of disclosure, engagement and education between the Commonwealth and the institutions, particularly in this period of intensification of regional challenge. But this bill is a ham-fisted effort. It uses a hammer for a job that really requires a Phillips head screwdriver. With the government's track record on these questions, I think we're entitled to a little bit of cynicism about the origins of this piece of legislation.

We know from the Senate estimates process that there was no consultation with the organisations and institutions and levels of government that would be affected by the implementation of the legislation. There's no national security requirement for secrecy. It's not necessary to sneak up on Australian universities or the governments of the states or territories or the peak organisations that represent local government. I think there was no consultation because the government hadn't got anywhere close to finishing the job. What drove the announcement of this piece of legislation was not a properly constructed set of national interest concerns but base domestic political expediency. It was done that week because the Prime Minister needed to get the aged-care crisis off the front pages. That should be a matter of deep regret, if they were capable of it, for senators on the other side.

As Senator Wong said, the issues that face us in the region are more complex than they've ever been before, more challenging than at any other period since the Second World War and more consequential for the Australian national interest than they've been in living memory. They affect not just our trade and our future security for us and our children; they affect the kind of collaboration and work for mutual gain that should be going on in our region. Instead of a considered, consistent approach led by the senior leadership of those opposite, what we've seen is a race to the bottom in what passes for backbench thinking and backbench adventurism about relations, particularly relations with China.

In terms of the states and territories, it's been said that the primacy of the Commonwealth is an unremarkable proposition. It's the absence of the Commonwealth that's the problem; it's the lack of leadership and the lack of clarity that Australia needs. Over the course of the last few years, we've seen a botched, misconceived, ham-fisted approach to our foreign relations. The Prime Minister posed for what I call the Craig-Kelly-member-for-Hughes audience, with that wacky speech to the Lowy Institute about negative globalism, deliberately posturing for some of the characters that inhabit One Nation and some of the elements of the backbench. Minister Payne has suggested that we need to improve the performance of global institutions, but the scale of resources and the scale of the commitment that Australia provides to its embassies and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has dwindled as the challenge got bigger. The suggestion—without any plan, without any means to achieve it, without any acceptance or reading of the geopolitical realities of it—that people with weapons inspection powers should be sent into China, without any capacity to deliver that strategy, was another soundbite foreign policy that led us nowhere. There has been a series of political appointments that give political appointments a bad name in Foreign Affairs. The buffoonery and clownish behaviour of the former Treasurer, Mr Hockey, and Mr Downer hasn't done us any favours at all on the international stage.

You can't have any confidence that this government has a proper construction of the national interest in mind when it frames this kind of legislation. It's true that the states and territories have always had a global and external affairs role. Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, at the very least—and I'm sure senators would make a claim for Adelaide, Perth and Hobart—are global cities. Sister-state relationships have been critical to growing economic relations and diversifying and growing our trade. The New South Wales and Guangdong Province agreement in 1979 has been critical to the economic development of the state of New South Wales. What I hope not to see as a result of this legislation is less engagement from the states and territories—fewer voices speaking up for the interests of Australians, Australian businesses and Australian communities. I suspect that what we'll see as a consequence of this legislation in terms of the Port of Darwin lease is nothing. I want to see more engagement from the states and territories. Of course, we'll never know what the position of the states and territories would have been had there been proper consultation. They refused to turn up to the Senate processes because I think they saw it for what it was: a shortened up process.

Let me come to the universities for a moment. I acknowledge that the explanatory memorandum, and the rules that were issued after the processes of the committee, have whittled away some of the regulatory burden for universities. But it remains the case that there was zero consultation for draft legislation that would have created an obligation for individual universities. To have tens of thousands of agreements registered with the Commonwealth, albeit now whittled down to probably a couple of hundred for each university, is an unacceptable proposition. The government wouldn't do it to any other business—they certainly didn't do it to private universities—but they've foisted on the university sector this wall of regulation, with very little public policy rationale, and it sits against the backdrop of an overwhelming hostility from this government to the university sector.

Why not carefully engage and consult? Build from the framework that's already been established in partnership with the universities, the University Foreign Interference Taskforce framework. Pursue the legitimate public and national expectation that institutional resilience, in terms of foreign interference, needs to be defended and protected and grown. Staff should be educated and enabled to participate in foreign engagements in the national interest. We should build a culture of universities and university staff asking questions and encourage more engagement. But the Liberals and Nationals don't understand how universities work. Global collaboration is fundamental to university research. Sharing expertise and research is fundamental to the work that our universities do. To name two things: both the COVID-19 genome sequence and the Gardasil vaccine are the products of deep collaboration and research between Australian universities and universities overseas, including in the People's Republic of China.

Of course, the gaping hole in this legislation is that, while there's a wall of regulation for our public universities, the private universities, such as Bond University, are not touched by the legislative framework. There's no regulation for them. I have seen, in the government's response to the committee's report, that there's a prospect that hospitals will be included at this late stage. There's been consultation, there's no public policy rationale; again it's just a case of sucking up to a few elements of the coalition backbench who have demanded this position.

We should be dealing with this set of issues from an understanding of the facts. There is increasing great power competition in our region. Over the past seven years, Australia hasn't done the work that is required on regional multilateralism and investment in relationships in the region. The work hasn't been done. There's been a withdrawal—a reduction, a diminution—of the capacity of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in terms of the scale of the challenge we face. There are structural challenges for Australia in the region. If events like today's deeply shocking tweet are any indication, we are likely to face more of these kinds of challenges in the future. There has been an aggressive, unhelpful and unfriendly series of actions in terms of our trading relationships. That requires a thoughtful, critical, strategic response founded on a clear understanding of our place and our role in the region and a capacity to articulate a regional commitment to multilateralism and a cooperative nationalism in the region. Instead, we've got guff from the Prime Minister—I still don't quite know what 'negative globalism' means—a series of unforced errors and no plan for how Australia is going to proceed in the region and approach these great issues of state.

Most disturbingly, we've seen a nasty streak emerge in the coalition backbench. I don't think the interventions of Mr Christensen and others have been helpful, I don't think the adventurism of some in this place has been helpful and I don't think recent events in the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Legislation Committee have been helpful. I do think that for a government that says it wants Australia to speak with one voice it wouldn't hurt to have a talk to the backbench and see if they could let it do the talking for a little while in this period of deepening challenge. Instead, discipline is required from the states and territories and the universities. (Time expired)