Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I am told to keep it short by the shadow minister, who is asking me to not defend the amendment moved by the coalition in the Senate. This is incredibly important for the conduct of academics in Australia and their research. One of their main criticisms has been that this has been rushed through, some say to coincide with the future visit from the US Secretary of State. There has been complaint after complaint about how quickly this process has been pushed through this parliament, and the fact that it took the Greens in the Senate to get the two-year review that some on the government benches are relying on to now support the passage of the bill suggests that this bill had problems in it from the start. Of course, the government to their credit have acknowledged that there are problems and worked to find some solutions, but those solutions have not been found because we now still have at the last minute, just today, Universities Australia saying to this place that the Senate's decision—that is, the passage of the coalition and Greens amendment:

… to match the US exclusion from fundamental research is an important step in ensuring a level playing field for export controls. Universities Australia calls upon the House of Representatives to give this serious consideration, as the Senate has done.

The Society of University Lawyers tells us that there is a real likelihood that the bill as currently drafted may do more harm than the risks it seeks to address, and they seek the support of this place for changes. The National Tertiary Education Union says they are alarmed at the inclusion of an amendment which, if passed into law, would create a criminal offence for the publication of certain material related to dual use technologies. So here we have being rushed through a bill in which, at the last minute, the universities and the academics are pleading with us to include some basic protection for research that is not intended to be caught by this. I think everyone in this House would agree that national security is important and that there should be restrictions, as suggested in the Senate, on providing a blueprint for some kind of weapon to someone who is an enemy of this country. If we are really concerned about that, perhaps we should be looking at what we are doing with our potentially deadly uranium and where, after second and third countries, that might find its way and into whose hands.

If it was simply a bill about dealing with that, that would be one thing, but it is not about dealing with that. The government and the opposition know it, which is why there has been a scramble to find a solution. What we know, because the experts and the people who are going to be affected by this are telling us very clearly, is that if this passes we have not fixed the problem. In fact, we are now introducing a potentially chilling regime into research in Australia and we are doing it quickly when there is absolutely no need to do it quickly and there is every need to give our researchers more time so that we can come up with a solution.

I hear the government's point that the amendment which provides the exemption is broadly drafted. The Greens moved a different kind of amendment in the Senate which was unsuccessful but which provided a defence for academics, rather than an exemption, a defence they were able to rely on to avoid prosecution. That was unsuccessful, but in the absence of that defence we need this amendment to remain and we need this protection to apply. Otherwise we are about, for the first time, to introduce criminal sanctions on our researchers at a time when they are telling us, 'You do this and it will affect the biomedical research that we do, it will affect the research into physics that we do, it will affect the research into infectious diseases that we do.' It is up to us in this place to listen to them and to heed the last minute plea of Universities Australia that we do what the Senate do—that is, maintain Australia's independence and maintain the freedom of our researchers to conduct their own research without fear that they may end up in jail.

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