Foreign interference laws ‘no protection from Trump edicts’

Tough laws designed to protect Australia from foreign interference will not shield universities from the latest flagrant encroachment on their autonomy, according to a research security expert.

Brendan Walker-Munro said the 2018 Espionage and Foreign Interference Act, the Foreign Interference Transparency Scheme, the 2020 Foreign Relations Act and last year’s changes to research sharing rules would all prove ineffective against a new intervention to align Australian research with the policies of the US government.

“These foreign interference laws [are] out of date,” said Walker-Munro, a senior lecturer in law at Southern Cross University. “They’re just not designed to fix the current problems.

“We always assumed [countries like] China, Russia, Iran [or] North Korea [would] send a spy to our country and bribe, manipulate or coerce our electoral officials. There’s no doubting that they have done that, and probably still do…but there’s so much more to the problem. Our friends can do this to us just as easily as our potential adversaries.”

A memo sent to Australian collaborators in US-funded research projects seeks assurances that they and their institutions have no involvement in diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, “environmental justice”, “gender ideology extremism” or “any party that espouses anti-American beliefs”.

It asks whether they have received any funding from China, including Confucius Institutes and “non-state actors”, along with Russia, Cuba or Iran. The 36 questions also include queries on how the projects “create measurable benefits” for the US – by strengthening US supply chains, combating drug trafficking and “increasing American influence”, for example – as well as project management issues like risk management and fraud mitigation.

Each question contributes up to five points in a 180-point scorecard that will apparently be used by US authorities to determine whether research partners in Australia – and other countries, according to the The New York Times – can continue to receive US funding. Recipients were given until 17 March to complete the survey.

Researchers elsewhere face similar uncertainty. UK-US research collaborations worth billions of pounds are under threat because of potential conflicts with Donald Trump’s executive order to end spending on DEI programmes.

Observers feared the new memo could scupper research contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Australian researchers. The Australian Academy of Science said US government research funding involving Australian collaborators had totalled A$386 million (£190 million) in 2024, equivalent to 43 per cent of all Australian Research Council grants.

Academy president Chennupati Jagadish urged Canberra to “urgently engage” with its American counterparts. “A wait-and-see approach could leave us dangerously unprepared. The Australian government must…resist foreign interference, regardless [of] the actor,” he said.

A spokesman for education minister Jason Clare said it would be premature to speculate about the impacts on local research. “Australia is engaging with the US government to understand what these measures mean for future funding and collaboration,” he said. “We [intend] to demonstrate the benefits of collaborative research to both US and Australia’s interests.”

Walker-Munro said meaningful action against the US under Australia’s recent research security legislation was extremely unlikely, given that it had barely been used against countries considered adversaries.

He said Canberra had only once considered using the powers under the Foreign Relations Act to veto a university agreement – Monash University’s A$10 million contract with Chinese aircraft manufacturer Comac, which was highlighted as a concern by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security – and no action had been taken after the Monash research quietly ended in 2023.

The legislation requires Australian universities to notify federal authorities about deals with partner institutions that lack “institutional autonomy” because a foreign government is “in a position to exercise substantial control” over them. Walker-Munro said that while the US memo might provide grounds to consider vetoing an Australian university’s agreement with a US partner, “the optics of that kind of a decision would be massive”.

“It would be admitting that we have a foreign policy issue with one of our biggest and closest partners. I don’t think the minister would revisit our relationships with the US if they weren’t willing to do it for China.”

He said the terms of deals with foreign funders had always exposed researchers to potential interference. “They might say you need to comply with, for example, the National Science Foundation’s policies, and those are set by whoever happens to be in power.

“That means Donald Trump can say, ‘I’m not going to fund anything that contains a DEI clause’ or…involves research with China. We’re really kind of powerless to stop him doing that, because at the end of the day, he’s running the country.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com