Universities cop a battering for China tie-ups

University chiefs have told senators Scott Morrison’s push to veto the sector’s deal with foreign entities will hurt the economy.

Liberal senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells. Picture: AAP

University chiefs have told senators that Scott Morrison’s push to veto the sector’s deals with foreign entities is a foreign interference “elimination strategy” that will hurt the economy, as upper house MPs pummeled higher education leaders over their members’ links to China.

A Senate hearing into the government’s foreign relations bill on Tuesday turned into an interrogation of university chiefs over research partnerships with the Chinese military and their failure to register Beijing-backed Confucius Institutes as foreign agents.

Both the Group of Eight and Universities Australia want parliament to reject the legislation, which will give the foreign minister power to veto state government, local government and university deals with foreign powers, unless it is seriously amended.

Go8 chief executive Vicki Thomson told the Senate committee on foreign relations and trade the legislation would cripple the already struggling university sector. “Regulatory boundaries must absolutely protect security but they must also enable economic and societal growth. This bill is like a fishing expedition — casting a net far and wide to ascertain what can be scooped up,” she said.

“National security threats are a lot like COVID — you can try to eliminate it and suffocate your economy and still fail or you can suppress it and then learn to live with it by identifying the weak spots quickly and putting a halt to them, and locking them down.

“This bill is an elimination strategy.”

The Senate’s China hawks — Coalition senators Concetta Fierravanti-Wells and Eric Abetz and Labor’s Kimberley Kitching — used the hearing to interrogate the higher education sector on Chinese influence in universities.

Senator Fierravanti-Wells pursued revelations in The Australian that China was actively recruiting leading Australian scientists for secretive research programs linked to the Chinese military, and Senator Kitching asked why universities including the University of Sydney and UNSW had allowed advertisements for the Hong Kong police, which has been accused of human rights abuses against pro-democracy protesters, on student career websites.

“There seems to be an inability to accept that as the custodians of knowledge and critical thought, universities also have a moral responsibility to help ensure that those institutions aren’t used for purposes Australians would never countenance,” she told The ­Australian.

Universities Australia chief executive Catriona Jackson said they were matters for the respective universities and not the peak bodies.

When asked if she had advised her universities to bring Confucius Institutes into line with foreign interference laws, Ms Jackson said it wasn’t in her ­purview.

“There are some things upon which we take a sector-wide approach. And there are some things that it is entirely appropriate for individual universities to take advice from us in the broad sense and then make their own decisions as autonomous institutions,” she said.

“Each of those relationships between a university and a Confucius Institute is governed by a contract which I do not have visibility of because I do not run those 39 universities.”

Senator Fierravanti-Wells said the answers from the university sector were inadequate.