Australia’s obsession with foreign interference is a threat to its academy

The news in Australia has recently been full of the government’s efforts to double down on dealing with foreign interference, including at universities.

In May, for instance, a Chinese PhD candidate was refused a student visa for alleged involvement in development of weapons of mass destruction because of his research on drones. In July, the government announced an expansion of the Countering Foreign Interference Taskforce, as well as new powers to expel suspected foreign agents. Then in August, UNSW-Canberra – the university collocated with the Australian Defence Force Academy – was accused of blacklisting Chinese academics.

Chris Taylor, an analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, says all this is just evidence of a “bipartisan, prioritised approach” by the Australian government. That is certainly true. The previous government made foreign interference a serious crime, ranking up there with espionage, treason and terrorism. And our security agencies have been trumpeting the threat posed by foreign interference – from enemies and friends alike.

As a result, there has been a lot of rhetoric about “stamping out” foreign interference in Australia’s higher education institutions as a pernicious extension of foreign state policy. But doing so comes at a considerable cost.

The simple fact is that academic research needs international collaboration to thrive. According to Elsevier’s bibliometrics site SciVal, 60 per cent of all scholarly publications from Australian universities since 2021 have featured international collaboration, with 80 per cent of those publications featuring a co-author from one or more of the “big five” research countries – the US, UK, Germany, Japan and China. If even collaboration with friendly nations, such as the first four of those, is considered problematic, where does that leave Australia’s many collaborations with China?

This is where Australia’s obsession with the rhetoric of countering foreign interference becomes a problem. Because while universities can adopt (and almost certainly have adopted) practices of “responsible” engagement with overseas research partners – perhaps with a bigger risk appetite for some collaborations over others – no university in the world has a tolerance for foreign interference.

Such rhetoric can harm other aspects of higher education policy as well. Reliance on international student fees to cross-subsidise research has long been seen as a national security issue – cue the Albanese government’s legislation to cap international enrolments, for instance. But teaching international students is a key domain of Australian statecraft, so limiting it is entirely antithetical to the nation’s interests, no matter how hard Canberra argues otherwise.

Far too often we blame entire countries for bad behaviour without looking deeper at the potential risks. Indeed, one of the biggest dangers with obsessing about foreign interference is that it takes over any rational discussion about adopting “research security”, a far more nuanced approach to risk awareness and mitigation that doesn’t involve shooting higher education policy in the foot.

We can see where we are going wrong if we look at the European Union. In May, the European Commission made clear that universities should protect their research, but not at the cost of international collaborations or the right to open science. This has led to many EU nations adopting the language of “responsible internationalisation” – a recognition that while threats to the collection and dissemination of knowledge are real and evolving, international collaboration remains vital to the emergence and discovery of knowledge.

Meanwhile, in the US, the National Science Foundation last month handed out $67 million in funding to establish a new “SECURE” centre for research security. Its director, Sethuraman Panchanathan, said at the launch that while “we must address threats to the research enterprise”, the “NSF is committed to principled international collaboration”.

Once it sees it has a problem, the Australian government needs to come to the table on research security with a comprehensive policy position – which it doesn’t currently have. It needs to make clear what it considers important at the crossroads of geopolitics and innovation. And it needs to undertake a far more nuanced examination of higher education policy and the place of the security and intelligence services in that picture.

Otherwise, we aren’t keeping our universities safe: we are locking them away from the rest of the world.

Brendan Walker-Munro is a senior lecturer in law at Southern Cross University.