Amanda Stoker (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in support of Australia's Foreign Relations (State and Territory Arrangements) Bill 2020, knowing that there have been plenty of examples that show the need for it. A good place to start is the Constitution of Australia, a document that, as a bit of law nerd, I feel strongly about, but the details of which matter a great deal.

Section 51 of this document sets out the legislative powers of this parliament, and something that's listed in section 51 is to be the subject of the work of this body to the exclusion of state parliaments. That's an important point for the purposes of this law, because section 51 subsection (xxix) gives this parliament, to the exclusion of state parliaments, the right to legislate on external affairs. Mum and Dad listening at home who may not be as big a law nerd as I am may ask, 'What on earth are external affairs?' External affairs are about Australia's relationships with other countries in the world. It's about foreign relations and diplomacy. And so it's entirely appropriate that the dealings of Australia conducted with other countries be done from the Commonwealth level.

That itself shouldn't be a controversial proposition, and yet we had a recent example in the Belt and Road Initiative where the Victorian government decided it wanted to sign up to China's global infrastructure project, a $1.44 trillion soft power initiative of the Chinese Communist Party designed to project its power among the world. In 2018 Premier Andrews decided to sign up to it without the support of the federal government, without consulting the federal government and without providing any notice to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. It is worth noting that they were the only state government that wanted to sign up to the agreement. It raised a really important question: do they even have the right to do this? In circumstances where we know that the Belt And Road Initiative is all about the ability of the Chinese government to strengthen its ties with particular places and to achieve particular geopolitical objectives, did a state government even have the power in the first place to make that kind of an agreement with the Chinese Communist Party? I'd suggest the conventional position is that they didn't, but the very fact that a state government thought that was something they could do without consultation or without discussion speaks to a need, and it's a need that is met by this bill.

I might move on to another example. In several universities in this country there are Confucius institutes. They're joint ventures between Australian universities, particular Chinese universities and Hanban, an agency that is part of China's education ministry. These are funded by the Chinese government and they operate on 13 Australian university campuses. If they simply fulfil the function of helping people to understand Chinese culture and get to know the language then they could potentially be a really good influence. However, we have come to learn that, rather than simply engaging in cultural and language education, they disseminate Chinese Communist Party propaganda, exert undue influence and attempt to outsource our curriculum to Beijing, striking agreements with our universities that allow to them to veto particular subjects, topics and themes from being taught in those universities. So we're dealing with something different entirely.

I'll give you an example. The centres have signed agreements explicitly stating that they must comply with Beijing—that is the Chinese Communist Party government based in Beijing—and their decision-making authority over teaching in those facilities. If we take the agreement that was initially signed by the University of Queensland, Griffith University, La Trobe University or Charles Darwin University, it stated that they 'must accept the assessment of the headquarters on the teaching quality at centres'. The way that this played out meant that an economics class funded by the Confucius Institute at the University of Queensland was caught teaching propaganda in which Uighurs and pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong were labelled 'terrorists'. Recently, the University of Queensland named Brisbane's Chinese consul-general in the position of honorary professor without any public announcement and, in doing so, showed the continuation of a tradition of strong influence that university management had told us had been superseded by the second agreement with the Confucius Institute. Last year, in the renewal of that agreement, which I referred to just a moment ago, the UQ committed to those arrangements continuing for the long term. The department of education has implemented a ban on Confucius institutes operating in public schools and, in doing so, they've cited concerns about foreign influence. It's worth noting that, across the United States, institutes of this kind have been shut down in a number of public and private universities.

Perhaps I'll go to a further example—the Thousand Talents program. That program is a Chinese government plan to recruit top scientists from around the world. Of itself, and if done in a purely academic arrangement, that need not be a bad thing. It aims to recruit Australian scientists and academics by offering lucrative incentives, but—and here's a significant condition—it obliges recruits to abide by Chinese law. That means that those academics continue to work full time for Australian universities while making frequent trips to China to visit the affiliated Thousand Talents university with which they have made their arrangement. That means they continue to apply for Australian Research Council grants, with the hope that there will be no checks about where that research will end up. It means that their new inventions face the risk of being patented by China, often in secret. And it means that those inventions are often commercialised, with China to reap the economic benefits, often of the Australian taxpayers' investment. That program has been described by the director of the FBI from the United States, Christopher Wray, as a form of economic espionage, with scientists legally signing away their rights to their intellectual property to China at the same time as they remain employed by Australian institutions. Additionally, China sends its researchers to work at Australian universities, and we need to be sure that, when that happens, the intellectual property that's shared isn't at risk. As I said, the Thousand Talents program need not be a bad thing. It's only when the arrangements associated with it are secret or seek to bequeath the intellectual property in which Australians have invested to the Chinese government that we start to see problems. So, when people say this legislation isn't necessary, we can start with the Belt and Road example, but we can flow through many of the others that I've just pointed to.

The fact is that the Commonwealth has responsibility for foreign policy. It's got the expertise to deal with it properly and to understand its implications and, yet, at the moment, there is no requirement for the states of this good country to consult properly with the Commonwealth and its departments about the arrangements they intend to make with foreign governments. And I think your average mum and dad in their homes tonight would be shocked by that. They would want to know that, if any government of this country wanted to do a deal with a foreign government, it would be something that those looking after foreign policy in this country would know about.

The bill is not about intruding excessively into the territories' and the states' business; instead, it's about providing Australians with the confidence that, when international arrangements are entered into, those who do so are doing it with due diligence, with an understanding of its implications, and to make sure that at all times those agreements are consistent with our national interest and our values. It would have been quite easy for many of those university parties which entered into agreements to establish Confucius Institutes to do so thinking that they were engaging in a perfectly positive exercise, not necessarily understanding that there was the potential for that arrangement to be misused. And so it's important that the Commonwealth seeks to ensure that states and territories respect our constitutional arrangements and, as a consequence, engage in processes that make sure they fully understand what they're entering into before they do so.

The Commonwealth and DFAT have the expertise necessary to make sure that state governments, universities and government agencies fully understand the consequences of the agreements they intend to enter into. They have the expertise to help those governments or institutions understand the consequences of doing so, making sure those things are consistent with our foreign policy. That's because, ultimately, it's all about the national interest. It's all well and good for a university to say, 'It was necessary to fund our bills this year,' or for a state government to say, 'We wanted to build this, that or the other'. Ultimately, everything we do as servants of the Australian people in our various parliaments or, indeed, in a publicly funded institution, has to be about the proper service of the national interest. And if consultation doesn't occur in the way that it should then the Commonwealth won't get an opportunity to properly review those arrangements. And if there isn't that due diligence and consultation we risk—it's a very real risk—having a messy patchwork of contracts, memorandums of understanding or well-meaning, but ultimately undermining, collaboration arrangements which could run counter to or have an adverse effect upon our foreign policy.

This bill is a call to all of our states and territories and to public institutions like our universities to work together and speak with one voice on the world stage. You wouldn't think that was a particularly controversial proposition. It applies to Australian public universities, not to private ones—that's an important distinction to make. But of course all universities, public and private, are encouraged to be transparent about their arrangements with foreign institutions by taking up the opportunity to consult voluntarily and to publish information about those arrangements on their websites so that both the public and our diplomats can properly understand the foreign policy implications of potential arrangements before they're entered into.

It's important that our universities are able to engage freely and fully on the world stage. It's the nature of good research in this era that our universities need to be able to collaborate with other universities. But it's important that when the Australian public makes an investment in research, when it makes an investment in intellectual property, it gets the dividend of that—that it isn't snaffled up by another government with another agenda which doesn't necessarily align with the interests of the Australian people. And it is vital that state governments understand, at all times, not only the constitutional separation of duties which means that the Commonwealth is in charge in this matter but that consultation is key to our foreign policy being consistent nationwide.