Mehreen Faruqi (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the Defence Trade Controls Amendment Bill 2024 and the Defence Amendment (Safeguarding Australia's Military Secrets) Bill 2024. The Greens oppose these bills in their entirety and for good reason: these bills are part of a suite of AUKUS related bills. In pursuing AUKUS, the government has ended even the pretence of an independent foreign policy. The AUKUS agreement is driven by imperialism and represents the racist and colonial ideas of the Anglosphere, different from the rest of the world. Military expansionism and warmongering should not be our future when the world desperately needs peace, yet AUKUS locks us into ugly partnerships with the war-hungry United States and the UK. Australia should not be supporting the United States to make and trade even more killing machines, nor to escalate a global arms race. Australia should be pursuing an independent foreign policy and fulfilling our responsibility to promote disarmament, justice and decolonisation around the world.

AUKUS is anything but good for Australia. Not only is our foreign policy totally beholden to a warmongering United States, the resources that we are pouring into AUKUS could be used so much better right here. We are in a cost-of-living crisis and, instead of funding critical public services and ensuring people can afford the very basics, the Labor government is spending $368 billion to build dirty nuclear submarines. Just imagine all the things that we could do with $368 billion. We could wipe student debt and make TAFE and uni free. We could put dental into Medicare and provide free universal child care for all. We could cap rents, build hundreds of thousands of public homes and end the wait list for social housing. We could make public transport free and build the clean energy systems our planet needs. The Labor government needs to get its priorities right and, instead of pouring more than half a trillion dollars into building into dirty war machines and stage 3 tax cuts for the rich, put people first, not profits and war, and ensure a socially, economically and environmentally just society for everyone.

In their single-minded pursuit of the AUKUS agreement, governments of both stripes have shown their myopic vision, one that is dominated by aggression and further militarisation of our already hawkish foreign policy. The Defence Trade Controls Amendment Bill is just the latest example of the government willing to do the United States' bidding and, in doing that, is putting Australia's research sector at risk.

As Greens spokesperson for higher education, my contribution today will focus on the damaging effects of the Defence Trade Controls Amendment Bill on Australia's university and research sector. The Greens proudly support an independent, fully-funded research sector where researchers have the freedom to collaborate with international research partners and feel valued and respected for their excellent contributions to the public good yet, alarmingly, this bill risks freezing a wide range of international research collaboration outside of the AUKUS bubble, cutting Australian research off from the rest of the world and exposing researchers to penalties of up to 10 years in prison.

Australia's excellent research sector does have an outsized impact. We have 0.3 per cent of the world's population yet we produce four per cent of global science. Across disciplines, it's clear that our research success depends on international collaboration. Indeed, international research collaboration is an explicit object of the Australian Research Council, the major funder of research in this country, and is supported by a range of bilateral agreements such as with the European Union.

The Academy of Science, during the inquiry on this bill, said:

We need to collaborate to get access to knowledge that we need to solve unique Australian problems. Most of the knowledge is generated elsewhere. The only way we get to use it, to see it and to do it is to participate in it and to help make the decisions that take us in the direction we want to go.

Yet this bill threatens to restrict this international collaboration and undermine our research sector.

The bill makes it an offence, unless a permit is obtained, for researchers to collaborate with non-AUKUS researchers, even those in their own institutions in Australia, on the development of dual-use technology. The list of dual-use technologies is extensive, including materials and infrastructure that almost all scientific and engineering researchers use, such as supercomputers, semiconductors and sonar scanners. Harsh penalties of up to 10 years imprisonment apply for failure to obtain or comply with a permit. Researchers have rightly raised serious concerns that the bill will have a chilling effect on international research collaboration and the employment of visiting researchers. A large proportion of Australia's research workforce is from overseas, and some research teams would need permits to carry on the entirety of their research, without which their continued collaboration could see them jailed. This really does ring alarm bells and has, rightly, drawn widespread criticism.

The chilling effect on Australian research of this bill is a very real likelihood. The Australian Academy of Technology Sciences and Engineering has warned that, where researchers and institutions are concerned about criminal sanctions, they are likely to stay clear of a research project rather than take the risk, which could leave Australia out of crucial international research efforts. And, as stated by the University of Melbourne in the inquiry into this bill, the bill would, perversely, make it harder for any individual to collaborate with an Australian research organisation if the individual is in Australia than if they are in the US or UK. In the research sector, where global mobility is essential, such a disadvantage could discourage global talent from working in Australia and create a push factor for them to leave. So the bill risks Australia losing many skilled researchers, which will undermine Australia's research capability across a large range of areas, including in national security, as some observed in the inquiry into the Defence Trade Controls Amendment Bill. In a disturbing irony, despite this bill purporting to improve our national interest, instead it risks a brain drain on our diverse and international academic sector and an undermining of research capability.

The bill makes an exemption to the permit system for research collaboration on dual-use technology with the United States and the United Kingdom. While this may make collaboration with these Western countries easier, the bill risks cutting off many of the critical research connections that Australia shares with other parts of the world. Universities and researchers have called for an expansion of the countries for which Australian researchers don't require permits to include many of our current and long-term research collaborators across Europe, South-East Asia, Oceania and the Americas. In the area of semiconductor development, for example, evidence was given in the inquiry into this bill that some Australian teams have 75 per cent of their workforce coming from non-AUKUS countries, including India and South Korea, where research would be disrupted. The National Tertiary Education Union has raised concerns that the AUKUS exception to research permits could lead to preferential treatment of UK and US researchers and increase discrimination against researchers from other parts of the world. So it is concerning that this bill imposes additional burdens on researchers and research students from other countries. Most will be people of colour who will be subject to greater scrutiny, suspicion and the burden of another onerous application process—as if they don't have enough to deal with already.

Researchers, universities and industry bodies have raised concerns about the significant regulatory burdens imposed by the bill. They have raised concerns about the lack of clarity around the permit application process, including how long it will take for a permit to be issued. As reported in the leading science journal Nature, there have already been delays under the current permit system. Vanessa Teague, a cryptographer at ANU, said:

On multiple occasions, although we had applied for permit renewal well in advance, the reissue was delayed so long as to leave a few weeks' gap, during which we were not permitted to continue normal research communication with overseas colleagues.

The article also states that on another occasion, a permit was granted but restricted her to communicating with only some of her colleagues in certain countries. Despite these significant risks, the sheer lack of consultation on this bill is deeply concerning and alarming but, I have to say, not surprising given the government's insistence on pushing ahead with AUKUS. An exposure draft of the bill had written consultation open for effectively only five working days back in November 2023. As was revealed in my estimates questioning last month, key research stakeholders such as the Australian Research Council, a major funder of research, did not make detailed submissions on the bill.

Meanwhile, there has been a separate independent review of the Defence Trade Controls Act announced in August 2023, with submissions closing in October 2023. But the progress and outcome of that review is unknown, and the bill's explanatory memorandum makes no mention of the review's findings being incorporated into this bill. This lack of transparency is completely and utterly unacceptable, and it smacks of lip service to consultation. While the committee said they were reassured by the department's evidence in the inquiry that peak bodies and companies were engaged with prior to the legislation being introduced into parliament, it is very concerning that researchers and universities were not mentioned and consulted more deeply.

The major parties have nevertheless teamed up to rush through this flawed legislation. At the very least the bill needs clear transitional arrangements for researchers and research students whose work could be affected. Those whose livelihoods and careers are already built around research on technologies that may now require permits under this bill ought to be considered and supported. As my colleagues in this chamber know, the Greens proudly support a university sector that acts for the public good, not for warmongering and not for political interests. I've been saying this for years, and, as a former academic, an independent research sector acting in the public interest is a deeply important and personal issue for me.

Last year the Labor government funded 4,000 Commonwealth supported places to enable skill-building for nuclear powered submarines under the AUKUS agreement. The National Union of Students at that time saw the folly of this AUKUS submarines program and called on the tertiary education sector to boycott the provision of training and technology for AUKUS submarines. We all understand that extra uni places for STEM disciplines are necessary, but creating these places to support AUKUS and warmongering is just gross. Unis should be contributing to peace, not war, and should play no part in weapons manufacturing. Just last week Labor finally agreed to pass legislation that substantially gave effect to my bill from five years ago to remove the ministerial veto power on Australian Research Council funding. Yet, worryingly, unlike my bill, the legislation retains a ministerial veto for reasons of security, defence and international relations. While Labor has ignored concerns from researchers and Australia's leading academies, and rejected my amendment to narrow this power, I did at least secure an independent review of the ARC board. This will hopefully provide some oversight to ensure ministerial powers are not exploited under the guise of security, defence and international relations. We need an independent research sector striving to act in the public good, not one that is helping to build dirty war machines at the whim of political interests.

The Greens will keep fighting for this. The Greens oppose this bill, which undermines international collaboration that is so essential for our research sector. This bill is just the latest example in a long list of both the Labor and Liberal parties blindly doing the bidding of the United States. Australia should be pursuing an independent foreign policy and fulfilling its role to create a world of disarmament, decolonisation and justice.