Universities push back on plan to require academics to declare foreign political links

Universities are pushing to limit the number of academics required to disclose their membership of overseas political parties under proposed new foreign interference measures as the government refuses to abandon the requirement entirely.

The move to force academics to reveal their overseas political affiliations is the most controversial element of draft foreign interference guidelines for the sector, with the federal government agreeing last week to redraft the proposal following a fierce backlash from university chiefs.

Universities are pushing back on a blanket requirement for all academics to disclose their foreign political party memberships.Credit: Tamara Voninski

But university sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity about the confidential discussions, said it was expected the political disclosure requirements would be retained in some form in the final document.

“There is no way government is letting this go,” one source close to the consultation process said.

“We don’t have an issue with transparency, but we have concerns with the way the disclosure questions are framed. The question has to be proportionate to the research academics are doing and the field they are in.”

Academics are already required to declare conflicts of interest for sensitive research, and the Australian Research Council began asking applicants to declare overseas political memberships for the first time in the latest funding round.

Labor Senator Kim Carr, a former research minister, said requiring disclosure of foreign party memberships was a “gross overreach” and posed a major privacy risk for academics, as the guidelines were not clear on what universities should do with the information once it was collected.

“We haven’t had an explanation as to who this information is being collected for, and for what purpose. Who gets access to it? Is it subject to freedom of information laws?” Senator Carr said.

The drafting of the proposed guidelines has been overseen by the University Foreign Interference Taskforce (UFIT), which was set up in 2019 and includes vice-chancellors, government department officials and representatives from security agencies. The taskforce has been consulting universities on the wording of the guidelines for the past few weeks.

The blanket rule initially proposed in the draft would have required all academics at every Australian university to disclose their foreign party membership for the past 10 years – covering tens of thousands of academics and applied equally to members of the US Democratic Party and the Chinese Communist Party. The government insisted on this country-agnostic approach, multiple university sources confirmed, rejecting an earlier draft of the guidelines that suggested a more restrictive definition of political affiliations.

That version, drafted by a UFIT working group led by University of NSW deputy vice-chancellor George Williams, proposed that only political affiliations contrary to Australia’s interests would require disclosure and there was no 10-year time frame. Professor Williams’ group has since been re-assigned to redraft the disclosure requirements.

Peter Jennings, executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said asking all academics to declare foreign party memberships was “unnecessarily onerous”, and the provisions should be redrafted to make clear the countries of extreme concern, namely China and Russia. Other countries of concern could include Iran and Turkey, he said, but the vast majority of countries should prompt no political disclosures requirements.

“The first thing to do would be to get rid of country agnosticism and give people a list of countries of concern, which of course will surprise no one, absolutely no one, as to what they are. Let’s just call it as it is, which is to say that the problem is overwhelmingly China,” Mr Jennings said.

He said the categories should be further narrowed to apply only to academics in areas of research at risk of espionage or intellectual property theft, such as hard sciences or defence studies.

“It doesn’t have to come down to: are you or are you not one of the 97 million Chinese who are members of the Communist Party. It is actually about: can your work be tapped for use by the state in China,” Mr Jennings said.

”I don’t think it is necessary to ask that question of a visiting Chinese academic in a literature department.”

Country-agnosticism has been a key feature of the federal government’s foreign influence laws, which favours not openly identifying the countries that are the targets of the laws. But its effectiveness has been questioned due to the range of low, or no-risk, activity caught in the sweeping approach. For example, former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and foreign minister Gareth Evans were required to register as potential foreign agents under the laws after they participated in a multilateral Asian peace forum.

Mr Turnbull’s former legal adviser Daniel Ward, one of the architects of the foreign influence laws and a visiting fellow at the ASPI, has called for the country agnostic approach to be scrapped in favour of applying greater regulation to high-risk authoritarian countries.

Mr Turnbull has instead suggested a “white list” of “friendly” countries be created that would include Australia’s Five Eyes intelligence-sharing partners – the United States, Canada, Britain and New Zealand.

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