David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

It's unusual, but far from atypical, to see the coalition and Labor, the war parties, teaming up to cause self-harm to Australia. But, of course, that's what the Defence Trade Controls Amendment Bill 2024 actually will do. It's an act of collective destruction, particularly against Australia's scientific community, and it's designed to wall off the Australian scientific and research community from the great bulk of global science and research. To see it being proposed by the Labor Party and then aggressively supported by the coalition simply because it's got the word 'AUKUS' in it is quite an extraordinary prospect. This is part of a suite of AUKUS related legislation that the government says is designed to keep Australians safer, but this legislation, especially the Defence Trade Controls Amendment Bill, will actually make Australia less smart and, ultimately, less safe.

The purpose of the bill is to create a bubble between the US, the UK and Australia for the purposes of defence research and for the purposes, particularly, of weapons research. That's its purported purpose. It's meant to make it easier for us to receive US weapons and to exchange research on weapons and weapon systems, primarily with the US. The UK is in this as well, but most people would describe the UK as the sick man of Europe at the moment. The UK defence bubble is hardly a bubble you'd want to join, but the UK is in the bubble as well. Within that bubble, the idea is that there'll be an export licence-free exchange of military equipment, military related hardware and military related research. But that's a tiny bubble, and in a global world where the bulk of critical research on things like artificial intelligence, lasers and super conductors is not being done in the UK, the US or Australia, it's not happening in the bubble. What's happening outside of the bubble is vastly more important. And Australia's ability—Australian researchers, scientists and small and medium enterprises—to engage with economies and researchers outside of the bubble is what will keep us safe. The bulk of the global cutting-end research is going to occur outside of that bubble.

With this bill, if a researcher engages in AI research, maybe laser research, super conductor research or other research Defence thinks may cut across national security outside the bubble if they haven't got their pre-approved licence it's literally a 'go directly to jail, you have no defences' bill. The chill that that's already put through the research community, through the academies of sciences, through groups like Science and Technology Australia—if you follow the evidence we had in the Senate committee—and through pretty much every higher education institute in the country, the chill that it's already put across our economy and across our research sector, you would have thought would be a warning sign to Labor that maybe they've got this wrong. Maybe, actually, jumping in a little Anglosphere bubble and cutting the rest of the world off is not the way of making us safer.

You can understand why the coalition will always do whatever the US wants. That's what they reflexively do. And, of course, the US wants us to jump in a bubble with them and exclude the rest of the world. But why is Labor so keen to do that, to chop us off from the rest of the world simply to toady up to the US on AUKUS? It's probably because they've utterly sold out their principles over decades. It's probably why a bunch of former Labor prime ministers and senior ministers are appalled by the Albanese Labor government's supine surrender to AUKUS. But, in this case, it's industry and the higher education sector who have said, 'Don't do this. Don't rush into this. This is an act of collective self-harm against our research and technology industries. Just don't do it.'

What did we hear from the Senate inquiry into the Defence Trade Control Amendment Bill? We saw the government say, 'This is all about AUKUS. Please put all of your critical thinking in a box, seal it off and don't access that part of your brain, because it's about AUKUS.' That's the basic plan on AUKUS. 'Just carve all of your critical thinking out. Seal it in a zinc box. Put it to one side and get on and do what the US are asking us to do.' That's a neat summary of the Albanese government's plan on AUKUS.

The government will spend $370 billion on nuclear submarines, give $5 billion to the UK for Rolls-Royce. We're literally giving $5 billion of taxpayer money to Rolls-Royce, courtesy of the Albanese government, because everybody knows there's no chance at all of them developing AUKUS SSNs or doing the complex engineering for AUKUS SSNs in the current state of the UK industry. So the Albanese government was thinking, 'What will we do with $5 billion?' They decided to give it to Rolls-Royce—during a housing crisis and a climate crisis. That was Friday's great announcement from the Albanese government, and that's on top of $4.7 billion they're giving to US shipbuilding and US jobs.

In fact, if you just line up the $5 billion payments that Australia have made to overseas economies from which we have not obtained submarines, it's pretty extraordinary. We gave $5 billion to France to not get submarines. Now we've given $5 billion as a downpayment to the US almost certainly not to get submarines, and we just dropped $5 billion on Friday to the UK. How many submarines do we have from that $15 billion spend? The last time I checked, it was nought. For this decade, how many submarines are we going to have for that $15 billion spend to date? Nought. In the early 2030s how many are we going to have for that $15 billion spend? Let me think; I'm going through the optimal pathway—nought. And then we only might get some if Donald Trump says it's a good idea. That's the overall architecture which this bill lies under. That's the AUKUS 'please cease critical thinking' framework that Labor has. This is another part of that AUKUS bill.

The House of Commons research library when looking at this part of the AUKUS agreement, the bubble bit, said:

A key part of the AUKUS agreement is the pledge contained in the initial leaders' statement to deepen defence ties and enhance joint capabilities and interoperability between all three countries. This includes developing a range of advanced military capabilities that are collectively known as AUKUS pillar 2 activities …

I don't think anyone much outside their defence establishment understands that there are two pillars of AUKUS—both dodgy. The first pillar is the almost $400 billion for nuclear submarines we're not going to get. But this is second-pillar stuff. This is the cooperation on a range of advanced defence military capabilities. Late last year the US Congress passed legislation that exempts Australia and Britain from some of the US's stringent export control requirements under their International Traffic in Arms Regulations, ITAR, scheme but only on the condition that both the UK and Australia pass similarly stringent export control laws. That's what this bill is meant to be. But, of course, this bill should be rejected in full. It has been rushed through, despite significant concerns from business and academia. It fails to address the very real issues that exist already within the Australian defence export regime, and it will have devastating impacts on the research and technology sector if it's passed without radical changes.

To be clear, the Australian Greens here are joining with thousands of academics and the great bulk of people in the nation's advanced manufacturing and research sector who do not want this to go through. In a moment of genuine political irony, this bill, which is being touted as making Australia safer as a national security response to a less certain world, will, in fact, make Australia much less safe. It will stunt academic and economic growth. As Dr John Byron, the Principal Policy Adviser of QUT, said of the bill:

… this whole bill is Boolean: there's ones and zeros; there's nothing in between; it's 'who's in, who's out'. Okay, there's an attempt to create some special conditions with other countries: the Foreign Country List; the use of Five Eyes classification clearances—that kind of thing. But it's still basically about: 'Are you in the tent or outside the tent?'

That description, I think, highlights the issues with the bill. Australia needs to have strong relationships with the vast majority of the research and scientific world that sit outside that Anglosphere tent—that 19th- or 20th-century Anglosphere tent—that Labor and the coalition seem so keen to keep us in.

As Anna-Maria Arabia, the Chief Executive of the Australian Academy of Science, highlighted during the Senate hearing, this law will actually harm leading Australian researchers. The example of the President of the Australian Academy of Science, Professor Jagadish, was provided as follows:

He works in the area of nanotechnology and semiconductor research. He can place 20 lasers in one strand of your hair—and why would he want to do that? Working at that scale means that he can create technology to better diagnose treatment for Alzheimer's disease, which is terrific.

It goes on:

His fundamental research is almost always published, as far as I'm aware. That's what he intends to do all of the time. But before it's published he speaks to his colleagues, he goes to many conferences and he collaborates with 30 countries. He's a fellow of 14 academies across the world. His research group is made up entirely of international students.

…   …   …

The implications of this bill, unamended, are that his research would cease or he would need to set up a closed area of his research laboratory where such research could be undertaken. There would be a question mark as to whether he could maintain his current students and collaborators. He would certainly not be able to access the research workforce that he's able to access today.

That's what this bill will do—shut down that critical research. That concern was shared by Dr Nadia Court, the director of Semiconductor Sector Service Bureau, who said at the hearing:

We know that there are a large pool of workforces coming from places like India and South Korea, which are not on the foreign countries list, and other areas in south Asia. That's concerning. We have companies we've spoken to where 75 per cent of their workforce come from countries not on that foreign … list.

As Dr John Byron said:

People move very easily. We will lose people. We will not get people that we want. And some of that will be research that is directly applicable to national security.

The evidence we heard in the Senate inquiry paints a disturbing picture of a national research brain drain that would weaken Australia's national security if this bill proceeds. That's been swept aside by Labor and the coalition in some incredibly hurried amendments, which sat warm on the photocopier when they were rushed through the lower house, and this uncritical cheer leading for AUKUS. Bizarrely, the Department of Defence responded to all of that with some of the most unhinged evidence you could imagine.

While the university and research sectors are saying that, if this bill passes, there'll be tens of thousands of permits required, Defence, when I asked them, refused to provide to the committee their modelling or any details of their modelling on what the regulatory burden will be. We had the bizarre evidence from Defence that they thought that under this new regime there would only be dozens of additional permits required per year. When we tested them on that and asked them to give us details in questions on notice, we got a refusal to respond citing national security reasons. Let's be clear: if Defence is right, and this only produces dozens of permits a year, there is no way that it would satisfy the US's requirements under AUKUS—no way at all—and it could not possibly be approved by the US administration as being compliant with our pillar 2 capabilities.

So either Defence have no idea about the impact or they were misleading the committee or it's a mixture of the two. Of course we should not pass this bill. Of course we should not pass its little friend which is again just designed to beat up national security hysteria, the Defence Amendment (Safeguarding Australia's Military Secrets) Bill 2024 either. I look forward to further discussion in committee.