Australia's research institutions are targets for nefarious actors, from China and elsewhere. The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) has publicly tabled an "awareness" of various attempts to compromise the sector.

What are we doing about it? Not enough, according to critics.

One recent charge is that Australia "lags behind" its allies and partners in responding to threats to "research security" such as espionage, foreign interference and theft of intellectual property, emanating overwhelmingly from China.

This is far from the case. On the contrary, Australia's flexible and proportionate response to the threat of foreign interference manages the risks without hampering the international collaboration that is essential to research in the 21st century.

Laggards or leaders?

Do research institutions really face a unique threat of foreign interference, compared with other sectors? And has Australia's response really lagged behind that of other countries?

In a submission to a parliamentary inquiry in late 2020, ASIO contended that the research sector does not face a unique level of risk. Rather, it is "just one of several sectors that is vulnerable".

And far from Australia being a laggard, ASIO's current director-general, Mike Burgess, told the same inquiry in March 2021 that, in his view,

"Australia is generally ahead of the curve when it comes to identifying and managing this risk."

Similarly, the Department of Home Affairs submitted that local efforts had attracted "significant interest from international counterparts" precisely because Australia was "leading and shaping international approaches to countering foreign interference, in the education and research sectors".

A changing landscape

Australia's response to the risk of foreign interference has developed rapidly over the past five or six years.

In January 2018, Vicki Thomson, chief executive of the Group of Eight coalition of leading universities, insisted the group had "not been provided with any direct evidence of overt influence in our universities".

Around the same time, Michael Spence, then Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sydney, recounted an earlier meeting between a group of university leaders and ASIO. He said they had asked directly whether there was "any hard evidence" that foreign interference in universities was happening. The answer, according to Spence, was "no".

The landscape has changed sharply since then. ASIO's understanding of foreign interference has progressed, as have the briefings given to universities and the collective response by government and research institutions.

A collaborative taskforce

In 2019, the Universities Foreign Interference Taskforce was set up as a collaboration between government agencies and research institutions. The taskforce has crafted best-practice guidelines for managing the risks.

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