Foreign Minister Penny Wong has made the right decision in terminating an Australian National University joint venture with a Chinese university linked to China's nuclear weapons establishment. The more disturbing question is why such an intervention was necessary in the first place, and how many other university relationships deserve the same scrutiny?
According to The Australian, Wong has terminated ANU's joint venture with Beijing Institute of Technology on national-security grounds. This is no minor diplomatic disagreement about ordinary academic exchange. Beijing Institute of Technology has longstanding links with China's defence establishment and has been associated with research relevant to military and nuclear capabilities. Whatever one's politics, an Australian government has an obvious responsibility to ask whether cooperation involving institutions embedded in the strategic apparatus of an authoritarian power serves Australia's national interest.
On this occasion, Wong deserves credit. National security should not be a partisan issue. When a Labor foreign minister makes the right call, conservatives should be prepared to say so. But the decision immediately raises a larger question: what else is happening inside Australian universities?
Australia's universities have become deeply internationalised. In itself, that is neither surprising nor necessarily undesirable. Science has always benefited from international collaboration. Australian researchers work productively with colleagues throughout Asia, Europe and North America, within reason.
The problem arises when the traditional ideal of open academic exchange encounters states that do not necessarily maintain the same separation between universities, government, intelligence organisations and military research that Australians assume exists here.
The Australian government itself acknowledges this danger. The Department of Home Affairs warns that foreign powers may seek to interfere in Australian universities, including by stealing research and influencing decisions. Communist China, anyone? The government established the University Foreign Interference Taskforce in 2019 specifically because universities possess valuable research, technology and expertise that foreign actors may seek to acquire or influence.
That makes intellectual property the elephant in the university laboratory. Australian taxpayers spend billions supporting universities, research infrastructure and competitive grants. Australian scientists and engineers may spend years developing knowledge with commercial, strategic or military applications. Once sensitive knowledge has passed overseas, however, it cannot simply be recalled. Intellectual property is unlike a stolen motor vehicle. You can recover the car. You cannot make somebody forget the engineering knowledge they have acquired as they head back to the mother country.
This problem becomes especially serious with dual-use research. An apparently civilian technology can have obvious military applications. Artificial intelligence, advanced materials, quantum technologies, drones, robotics, communications, cybersecurity, aerospace engineering and nuclear science all inhabit this grey zone.
A research paper does not need to contain a blueprint for a weapon to have strategic value. Scientific knowledge accumulates incrementally. Methods, experimental results, software, manufacturing techniques and even knowledge about approaches that failed can save another research program enormous amounts of time and money.
This is why the ANU case should not be dismissed as an isolated administrative tidying-up exercise. Recent revelations have already produced broader concern about Australian university collaborations involving China, Iran, Russia and other states. Australian Research Council data reported earlier this year showed 1,468 ARC-funded collaborations involving China since 2014, with substantial activity in engineering and computing. That does not mean all those collaborations were improper; we just don't know yet. But the scale alone demonstrates why proper scrutiny is essential.
The government has now moved toward substantially stronger oversight. Proposed changes give the Foreign Minister greater power to scrutinise and potentially veto university arrangements on national-interest grounds, while ASIO is being given an enhanced role in examining sensitive foreign relationships. The government has also moved against research grants presenting security concerns.
Again, this is sensible. Universities cannot simply respond by chanting "academic freedom" as though that ends the argument. Academic freedom protects inquiry and intellectual disagreement. It does not create an entitlement to transfer strategically valuable Australian knowledge to any foreign institution a researcher happens to choose.
Nor should universities themselves necessarily have the final word on national-security questions. A professor of engineering may be exceptionally knowledgeable about engineering while knowing very little about Chinese military-industrial structures or intelligence operations. A university administrator may be even less qualified to make that assessment. And then there are the economic interests and greed that universities excel in.
That is why Australia has intelligence and national-security agencies. There is also an institutional conflict of interest that deserves recognition. Universities benefit enormously from international engagement. Foreign students bring revenue. International partnerships increase publication counts. Joint research can improve rankings. International grants and collaborations enhance institutional prestige.
Those incentives are not inherently corrupt, but often are. But neither do they necessarily coincide with Australia's strategic interests. A university therefore cannot reasonably say, "Trust us, we have assessed the risk," when the university itself benefits from maintaining the relationship; conflict of interest. Independent government scrutiny is precisely what should occur when the potential consequences extend beyond the university campus.
The unanswered question is how much Australian intellectual property and research knowledge has already travelled overseas through collaborations that received inadequate scrutiny?
Nobody should pretend to know that figure without evidence. It might be relatively small. It might be substantial. The very problem is that Australia appears not to possess a comprehensive public accounting capable of answering the question.
That should change. The government should conduct a systematic audit of sensitive university collaborations with institutions connected to foreign militaries, intelligence organisations and authoritarian governments. It should examine not merely formal contracts but research outputs, personnel exchanges, visiting appointments, jointly developed technologies, data access and the movement of intellectual property.
Such an audit need not become a witch-hunt against Chinese-Australian academics or international researchers generally. The relevant issue is institutional relationships, strategic technologies and undisclosed or inadequately assessed foreign influence.
Penny Wong's decision therefore deserves support. But cancelling one ANU arrangement cannot be the end of the matter. It should be the beginning of a much larger investigation. Australian universities sit upon an enormous national asset: knowledge. Some of that knowledge is publicly available, some commercially valuable and some potentially strategically important. Governments would never allow foreign states unrestricted access to defence installations simply because cooperation was academically interesting. Intellectual infrastructure deserves a comparable seriousness when the research has obvious strategic applications.
The ANU decision tells us that at least one university relationship crossed a line serious enough for the Foreign Minister to intervene. Australians are entitled to know how many others are standing close to it.
We need a Royal Commission into all aspects of the universities, something conservatives are not addressing.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/penny-wong-axes-anu-joint-venture-with-chinese-university-linked-to-nuclear-weapons/news-story/208c9b03c2da5a3d7b71e15841f8ef17