Uni of Queensland chancellor Peter Varghese defends China accusation

University of Queensland chancellor Peter Varghese responds to a parliamentary attack on his institution’s China links.

University of Queensland vice-chancellor Peter Hoj

University of Queensland chancellor Peter Varghese has strongly defended his vice-chancellor Peter Hoj from a parliamentary attack by Liberal Senator James Paterson, who said Professor Hoj’s $200,000 bonus incentive was partly responsible for the university’s over-reliance on Chinese students.

Mr Varghese accused Senator Paterson of quoting selectively from leaked university documents “to unfairly attack Professor Hoj’s character under the cloak of parliamentary privilege”.

Senator Paterson told the Senate on Tuesday night that one of Professor Hoj’s KPIs for his $200,000 bonus in 2019 was to strengthen the university’s relationship with China.

According to Senator Paterson, one of his KPIs said: “Continue to work towards a sound and strategic positioning in China, given its potential rise towards becoming the predominant provider of research globally and that it will continue to be a very important source of international students over at least the next five years, and likely more, barring geopolitical barriers being erected.”

Senator James Paterson

Senator Paterson said the UQ senate’s remuneration committee had noted, in judging Professor Hoj’s performance, that “demand for UQ courses from China has continued to grow strongly, and we will likely end up with 63 per cent of commencing international students coming from China in semester 1, 2020.”

He told the Senate that the university should not have regarded this as a positive.

“Far from an achievement warranting a bonus paid from student fees and taxpayer dollars, the prospect of 63 per cent of a university’s foreign students coming from only one country should have been an alarm bell,” Senator Paterson told the Senate.

He said universities, including UQ, had not heeded warnings that they were too reliant on China for international students and needed to diversify.

In response, Mr Varghese — a former head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and a former director-general of the Australia’s peak intelligence agency, the Office of National Assessments — said that because Chinese students accounted for about 20 per cent of UQ’s revenue and China was a major research partner, “it would be surprising if the management of this relationship was not one of the vice-chancellor’s KPIs”.

“There is nothing subversive about this,” he said on Thursday.

University of Queensland chancellor Peter Varghese

Mr Varghese said that, while Professor Hoj had been criticised for his links to China it was “worth noting that he has been a significant contributor to the design of the (federal) government’s framework on how to manage areas of research with foreign partners that may have national security implications”.

He said that, as a former DFAT and intelligence agency head, he was “not unfamiliar with both the risks and the opportunities in our relationship with China”.

Diversification of international students was best achieved by growing other markets, not radically shrinking the China market, Mr Varghese said.

Australia had to come to grips with China’s emergence as a leading economy and research powerhouse, he added.

“Our political systems and values are very different. But boycotting China is not a sensible option. What we need is clear-eyed engagement with China which serves our interests and is faithful to our values,” Mr Varghese said.