Claire Clutterham (Sturt, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak in support of Australia's Foreign Relations (State and Territory Arrangements) Amendment Bill 2026. This bill speaks to Australia's international engagement. Australia has always prioritised international engagement: the building of relationships and fostering partnerships and cooperation; the active participation in regional and global affairs to seek to shape direction and uphold international order; and the prosecution of diplomatic, economic and security interactions to the benefit of national interest.

International engagement matters. It is critical for addressing regional challenges, promoting peace and maintaining regional and global stability. Addressing common global challenges like climate change, security threats, energy security, economic inequality and economic prosperity will only ever be meaningful when states engage internationally to build alliances, influence norms and contribute to the balance of power within the international system.

Australia's international engagement is far-reaching, strategic and effective. Australia's international engagement is directed at maintaining peace, stability and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific region at the same time as ensuring Australians remain safe, free and secure in the face of growing terrorism and other security threats. Australia's international engagement is also directed at maximising opportunities for Australian businesses by investing in strategies to ensure markets remain open, trade and investment happens, and capital flows into the country.

Australia's international engagement is also directed at supporting the rules based order to shore up the foundations for stability and prosperity so that global and regional challenges can be met in collaboration with our friends, our partners and our allies at the same time as focusing on Australia's sovereign capability and power. This bill acknowledges the many benefits Australia has enjoyed from its international engagement and remains absolutely consistent with and reflective of Australia's national interests. In 2020, Australia introduced the Foreign Arrangements Scheme, which is dedicated to ensuring that arrangements between state or territory governments and their entities and foreign entities do not adversely affect Australia's foreign relations and are not inconsistent with Australia's foreign policy.

This scheme creates an approval process for what are called 'core foreign arrangements' and a notification process for what are called 'non-core foreign arrangements'. A core foreign arrangement is an arrangement between a core state or territory entity and a core foreign entity. A non-core foreign arrangement is an arrangement between a core state or territory entity and a non-core foreign entity, a non-core state or territory entity and a core foreign entity, or a non-core state or territory entity and a non-core foreign entity. What does that actually mean? A core state or territory entity means states and territories themselves and state and territory governments, departments and agencies. A non-core state or territory entity includes local government and Australian public universities.

If we're talking about Australian public universities, the Foreign Arrangements Scheme operates to require notification of a proposal to enter into foreign arrangements, with the minister receiving that notification and having the power to make a declaration prohibiting the entity from negotiating or entering into that non-core arrangement if the minister is satisfied that the negotiation or arrangement would adversely affect or be likely to adversely affect Australia's foreign relations or if it would likely be inconsistent with Australia's foreign policy. Demonstrating the breadth of Australia's international engagement, since 2020, over 22,000 notifications have been received. As well as demonstrating the breadth of our international engagement, this also demonstrates the importance of maintaining appropriate oversight of these arrangements. Managing risk at the same time as advancing partnerships that are beneficial to Australia is the name of the game.

Through this lens, in 2024, the Albanese Labor government commissioned a review of the Foreign Arrangements Scheme, which was led by Ms Rosemary Huxtable. The point of this was to ensure that agreements with foreign countries are consistent with Australia's national interests and also to better equip Australian subnational governments and public universities to manage risk and benefit from opportunities. It was a holistic review of what could go wrong, as well as what could go right. Five themes arose from this review, resulting in 23 recommendations, all of which were accepted by the government.

Firstly, the recommendations focused on how to best strengthen the capacity of the scheme to consider the national interest and how to improve governance and data sharing and provide more coordinated support to entities affected by the scheme. Secondly, they considered how to effectively regulate risk by reducing the number of low-risk arrangements notified to the scheme by exempting certain arrangements, and to reform the scheme processes to more strongly focus on high-risk arrangements. Thirdly, the recommendations looked at the legislative settings following the then four years of scheme operation, and determined that refreshing key concepts of the foreign relations act to improve flexibility and administrative efficiency through greater use of delegations. Fourthly, administrative efficiencies were identified. Fifthly, the recommendations identified a need to increase transparency by improving visibility of scheme data to affected entities, and to enhance the public register as a single source of truth and an authoritative source of current arrangements.

This bill responds to the review's findings and implements a number of those recommendations that were made by Ms Huxtable. Drawing on those recommendations, this bill aims to increase the focus on Australia's national interests by improving risk management tools, and to reduce the administrative burden for low-risk arrangements. In the international engagement space the government needs to regulate, to facilitate and to proportionately manage risk, not regulate to paralyse. This bill strikes the balance in several ways. It strengthens the scheme by directly referring to and acknowledging the national interest, refocusing the act and ensuring the holistic consideration of decisions from different perspectives, including security, economic and foreign policy. It also introduces a disclosure framework to facilitate the sharing of information collected through notifications made under the foreign relations act to the Australian government and other prescribed entities, supporting coordinated whole-of-government decision-making. Importantly, the bill also extends the foreign relations act to include overseas campuses of Australian universities—which we know are becoming more common, particularly in the Middle East and Asia—with a clear and present opportunity for further expansion onto the African continent.

Timeframes for the consideration of core foreign arrangements, which are those entered into by states and territories, state and territory governments, departments and agencies have been extended by an additional 30 days to allow a deeper and more considered review of what are becoming increasingly complex arrangements, and considering these against the national interest.

With respect to streamlining the scheme, the bill does this in a number of ways. It introduces a one-step notification for non-core foreign arrangements. It also amends the notification requirements for renewals and variations of core foreign arrangements to ensure ministerial approval is not required for previously approved core foreign arrangements if the variation in question is minor. It also allows the minister to deem certain core Australian state or territory entities, foreign entities and arrangements are non-core, meaning they fall into the category of notification, not approval.

Although this bill does simplify the Foreign Arrangement Scheme, it does so without compromising effective oversight and without paralysing Australia's international engagement, so that it can continue to deliver strategic and economic benefits to our country, always in the national interest.

One of Australia's great public research universities is Adelaide University, which was formed by the public merger of the University of Adelaide and University of South Australia operating as a government supported institution established under South Australian state legislation. It began operations on 1 January this year and it welcomed its first students a couple of months later. Adelaide University is well on its way to realising its vision of being a leading, contemporary, comprehensive university of global standing. It's dedicated to ensuring the prosperity, wellbeing and cohesion of society by addressing educational inequality through both the actions of the university and the success and impact of its students and its alumni. It has a deliberate strategy to partner with the community and partner with industry so it can achieve the goal of conducting outstanding future-making research of scale and focus.

By 2034, the new Adelaide University is forecast to contribute an estimated additional $500 million a year to the South Australian economy and educate more than 70,000 students. This is about 13,000 more than the existing two universities were educating. It will also create an additional 1,200 jobs. A globally competitive university that is sustainably positioned in the top-100 universities in the world will not only be able to provide high-quality teaching to students of all economic backgrounds but will be able to secure a greater share of funding for high-quality research and to work actively and meaningfully with local business and industry.

This merger, this creation of Adelaide University, a public university, is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for the state of South Australia. It'll be the largest educator of domestic students in Australia and will have the scale and resources to be sustainably positioned in the top100 in the world. Indeed, in June this year, Adelaide University moved up the world university rankings, reaching 79th position, firmly cementing it as a global top-100 university. In Australia, it was ranked eighth out of the other 36 tertiary institutions on the list and second for its international research network. Its focus on targeted innovation and research and development is right. It's the key to unlocking further economic growth and prosperity, not just for South Australia but for the entire country and beyond.

To be placed in the top 100 universities in the world and second in Australia for international research networks is not only an outstanding achievement but one that will enable the Adelaide University to attract more research investment for the state of South Australia. As the new Adelaide University's vision has articulated so clearly, collaborative efforts between academia, industry and government agencies are crucial for pushing the boundaries of research and development. Collaborative research and development initiatives enable the sharing of knowledge, resources and expertise, leading to more robust and innovative outcomes. Well-funded and targeted research and development leads to improvements in social welfare, quality of life, environmental sustainability, economic growth and job creation, and national security. Research and development must remain as a central pillar of our national economic and innovation strategies and, like this bill, it is in Australia's national interest. I commend the bill to the chamber.

Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Regional Health) | Link to this | Hansard source

I, too, rise to speak on the Australia's Foreign Relations (State and Territory Arrangements) Amendment Bill 2026. At the outset, I'll put the coalition's philosophical position on all bills, particularly this one: we need less bureaucracy where there is little genuine risk but stronger scrutiny where the risk is real. This bill should be understood through a simple principle—that is, Australia needs one coherent foreign policy, and that is especially relevant when states, territories, councils, public universities any organisations want to engage internationally. Those engagements are overwhelmingly positive—absolutely, overwhelmingly positive. Everyone in Australia should be encouraged to see what's out in the world. I was the beneficiary of a Churchill Fellowship to investigate the links between secondary education and industry in Germany, Finland, Sweden and the United Kingdom. I was just one of many people or organisations who engages with and creates relationships with foreign entities and foreign countries to be able to bring knowledge from around the world back here.

But problems can arise when foreign actors deliberately or otherwise influence or attempt to influence Australian institutions in ways that cut across or are inconsistent with what a Commonwealth parliament has decided is in our national interest. Therefore, the Commonwealth needs visibility of significant foreign arrangements and the ability to act where Australia's interests could be threatened. That is why the former coalition established the Foreign Arrangements Scheme in 2020. One of the main issues that forced that Foreign Arrangements Scheme was the then Victorian premier Dan Andrews's decision to sign up to China's Belt and Road Initiative.

Just for the history on this, Victoria entered into a memorandum of understanding in 2018 and a framework agreement in 2019 with China's National Development and Reform Commission. Those arrangements were not ordinary commercial contracts that you might see; they carried strategic and symbolic significance, because, as we know, the Belt and Road Initiative is one of Beijing's signature foreign policy and infrastructure initiatives. The Commonwealth had deliberately made the decision not to sign Australia up to the Belt and Road Initiative at a national level. So we had this situation where one state government was effectively sending a different signal internationally, in relation to Australia's foreign relations and foreign interests, from that of the elected Commonwealth government. I think we could all agree that that was an untenable position.

I want to be very clear about this. The issue is not whether Victoria or any state—or, indeed, our nation—should trade or engage with China or any international partners. In fact, I come from an electorate where our trade with China has built and expanded many industries, particularly the dairy industry. You only need to go through supermarkets in parts of major Chinese cities to see the amazing products from the Goulburn Valley—and from other parts of Australia—and particularly the dairy products. People are prepared to pay such a premium for those because of the food safety, because of the high quality—because of the trust that people not just in China but around the world have in Australian farmers. So that wasn't an issue, and the Victorian government does well and other state governments do well to engage with foreign countries in relation to enhancing export opportunities. The issue was whether a state government should be able to enter into arrangements with a foreign national government that cut across what has been decided are our national foreign policy settings.

What happened was that the former coalition government used the Foreign Arrangements Scheme in April 2021 to cancel Victoria's Belt and Road arrangements after determining they were inconsistent with Australia's foreign policy or adverse to Australia's foreign relations. That episode showed that foreign policy cannot and should not be outsourced, fragmented or run state by state. In relation to Victoria, the agreement, when you read what it was about, promised to 'increase the participation of Chinese infrastructure companies in Victoria's infrastructure construction program'.

We can debate what the BRI is, and we can debate its impact around the world, but the key element is: Who should decide whether Australia gets involved in it? Should it be a state government or should it be the Commonwealth government? It absolutely should be the Commonwealth government. As to the Victorian government, a state government doesn't even have a foreign affairs minister. So this was Premier Andrews making what I think was a major strategic misjudgement and a fairly heavy-handed decision—which Premier Andrews did quite often in Victoria—I must say, to the great detriment of what we now experience in Victoria. I hope the people of Victoria will remember some, or maybe many, of the decisions that Premier Andrews made during his time as premier. Hopefully, they will factor that into the decision they make in late November when deciding whether to have a fresh start, if I could put it that way.

The bill doesn't just apply to states; it applies to other entities, including universities. Universities are great institutions in Australia. Their interactions with foreign entities, universities and in some cases governments can be a positive thing. But there's got to be some sort of—and this is what this bill does—reporting of arrangements that universities want to develop with foreign entities and governments so that it can be assessed and we can make sure that Australia's foreign interests are being looked after in relation to these arrangements.

The explanatory memorandum frames the bill as both strengthening and streamlining the Foreign Arrangements Scheme. It strengthens that scheme by shifting the decision-making framework from the narrower concept of foreign relations to a broader national interest test. This matters because the national interest test includes security. It includes economic, strategic and foreign policy considerations, not just that formal diplomatic consistency. We feel like there is a gap in the legislation, which is significant researcher-to-researcher collaboration. The coalition amendment would close that gap and make sure that any researcher-to-researcher arrangements that could impact Australia's national interests is targeted and proportionate.

Australia has had a very proud history of foreign policy since federation. Australia has generally participated very well on the foreign stage. There's always been this focus on Australia's national interest, but it has to be a national responsibility. Therefore, it has to originate in this place. It has to originate in this place, which is the Australian parliament and the Australian Commonwealth executive government. It can't be run by a patchwork of state-by-state arrangements. We have premiers of various proclivities when it comes to that. Australia should engage confidently with the world, but not in a naive way. The test should be simple: does the arrangement serve Australia's national interest?

The Victorian Belt and Road deal and saga with Premier Andrews and the Victorian government showed why the Commonwealth needed visibility and power to act. The coalition created the Foreign Arrangements Scheme because that sovereignty needs to be protected. Strengthening and streamlining the scheme is sensible, but the streamlining can't become weakening. There should be less bureaucracy for low-risk arrangements but stronger scrutiny when the risk is real.

To finalise my remarks and make it very clear—and I would hope most people in this place would understand and agree with this—constitutionally, the federal government has responsibility for foreign relations and significant arrangements with foreign nations. That needs to be the case. It needs to be embedded in law. This bill goes a long way towards doing that, and I commend it. I encourage the government to support the coalition's amendment, which will strengthen it even more.

Luke Gosling (Solomon, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in support of the Australia's Foreign Relations (State and Territory Arrangements) Amendment Bill 2026. This bill updates a piece of legislation that has, in six years of quiet operation, become one of the more consequential tools Australia has for regulating Australia's engagement with the world. The Foreign Arrangements Scheme does not make headlines the way a trade deal or a defence pact does. It covers a broad range of relations and how Australia interacts globally. It sits underneath almost everything this country does internationally below the level of this parliament. That includes every friendship agreement a state government signs, every research partnership a public university enters and every sister city arrangement a local council strikes—and where I'm from, in Darwin, there are certainly many of those.

This bill reforms Australia's Foreign Arrangements Scheme, which oversees international agreements entered into by state, territory and local governments and public universities. The bill follows the 2024 independent review by Rosemary Huxtable, which found that the scheme was broadly working but needed to be more risk focused and less burdensome. Since 2020, more than 22,000 arrangements have been notified under the scheme.

There are a number of key changes in this bill. The most important relates to national interest. The bill will explicitly make Australia's national interest, including security, economic and foreign policy interests, a central objective of the scheme. The bill also brings stronger risk management, which allows conditions to be placed on foreign arrangements rather than simply approving or rejecting them, including conditions imposed after an arrangement begins. Then there will be whole-of-government information sharing, allowing information gathered under the scheme to be shared with relevant Commonwealth agencies; broader coverage, capturing arrangements involving overseas campuses of Australian universities; change in relation to noncompliance, giving the minister more proportionate options for dealing with inadvertent breaches; less red tape, with removal of unnecessary approval requirements for low-risk matters, including minor variations and renewals of previously assessed arrangements; greater clarity, with clarification of concepts such as institutional autonomy to make compliance easier; better transparency, with modernisation of the public register so that it remains accurate and focuses on significant decisions; and more administrative flexibility, allowing targeted delegation and limited extensions to decision-making timeframes for complex cases.

The bottom line is that our government is arguing that the bill strikes a balance between protecting Australia from foreign interference and strategic risks and making it easier to undertake legitimate international engagement in the national interest. In essence, it is a risk based tightening of the scheme, combined with deregulation for low-risk arrangements. This is what sensible parties of government do. We manage risk to make sure we can claim value in as much of the upside as possible while minimising the downside risk.

The case for the original act, back in 2020, was fairly straightforward: foreign policy is and must remain a Commonwealth responsibility. But state and territory governments, local councils and our public universities have, over decades, built up thousands of their own direct relationships with foreign governments and foreign institutions—naturally and sensibly, in the overwhelming majority of cases—in pursuit of trade, research and cultural ties that benefit their communities. The problem was never the existence of these relationships; the issue was that no-one in Canberra could see all of them at once, and, without that visibility, this country had no way of knowing when one of them might cut across our national interest.

In the years since, the Commonwealth has used this act to step in where a state-level arrangement no longer stacked up against Australia's foreign policy. These interventions are worth pausing on because they show the framework doing exactly what it was built to do—not blocking the thousands of ordinary partnerships that make up the bulk of the register but catching the small number that genuinely warrant Commonwealth attention on risk informed grounds.

Darwin and Palmerston in the Northern Territory—the place that I'm so proud to represent—sit closer to Dili, the capital of Timor-Leste, and Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, than they do to this very building, the seat of our national democracy. Our government, our university and our local councils carry a number of longstanding friendship agreements and education partnerships with overseas provinces and institutions, some dating back to the 1990s and all of them sitting on the national foreign arrangements register, alongside more than 9,000 other arrangements notified by governments and universities right across the country. These are, almost without exception, at the run-of-the-mill, low-risk end of the scheme—for example, education exchanges, twinning arrangements, research collaborations.

We need to be able to differentiate agreements with foreign entities and actors based on risk. The kinds of arrangements described above should be treated proportionally rather than put through the same degree of rigour and due process that higher risk arrangements should rightly be subjected to. Territorians don't need reminding of what happens when a decision with international implications gets made without anyone in Canberra seeing it first. In 2015, the then CLP government leased the Port of Darwin to a Chinese-owned company for 99 years. This was a decision made entirely at the Territory level by the CLP government, with no requirement to notify the Commonwealth beforehand and no opportunity for it to consider the proposal. To be clear, that lease sits outside the scope of this act, then and now, as critical infrastructure transactions are governed by a separate regime entirely. But the alarm that it caused right across the political spectrum is illustrative and is a large part of why an appetite for a framework like this one existed in the first place.

Territorians know better than most what it feels like to read about a consequential decision in the newspaper instead of being consulted on it. The bill before the house gives effect to the findings of the 2025 independent review of the scheme, led by Ms Rosemary Huxtable AO PSM. It drew on public submissions from the state and territory governments, who administer these arrangements day to day, from local councils and from the university sector, which has carried much of the scheme's compliance burden since 2020. Twenty-three recommendations came out of that process. The government has accepted every one of them, and this bill is delivering on that.

At the heart of the bill is a change to the test itself. Currently, the minister assesses a proposed arrangement against whether it adversely affects Australia's foreign relations or is inconsistent with our foreign policy. This bill broadens that test to the national interest, allowing security and economic considerations to be weighed alongside foreign policy, not as an afterthought to it. The bill also gives the minister a genuinely new tool, the power to approve an arrangement subject to conditions, rather than facing the binary choice of approving it outright or refusing it altogether. For an arrangement that is broadly sound but carries one specific area of concern, that is a far more proportionate response than an outright knockback, and it is a change that state and territory entities themselves have asked for through the review process.

Where the bill streamlines, it does so with real practical effect for jurisdictions like the Northern Territory. Low-risk arrangements and entities can now be deemed non-core by rule, cutting them out of the full approval pathway. Non-core arrangements move to a single-step notification process rather than requiring notice before entry and again after. Critically, where the minister has already approved a core arrangement once, a minor variation no longer triggers a full re-approval process from scratch.

The bill makes a series of further improvements that, taken together, modernise how the scheme actually functions. It establishes a proper framework for sharing the information collected through notifications across government, so that agencies with a legitimate interest in an arrangement are not working in the dark, while keeping that information subject to the same obligations of confidence that apply today. It requires state and territory entities to notify the minister when an arrangement is terminated early and when a longstanding arrangement exists with an entity newly prescribed under the rules, with reasonable transition windows of three to six months built in rather than having an unrealistic overnight compliance deadline which closes in gaps that left the register incomplete. It brings the overseas campuses of Australian universities within scope for the first time, addressing a real gap where a campus with separate legal status offshore fell outside the definition of a state or territory entity altogether. And it is very important that we are closing those gaps.

The bill also makes a consequential amendment to the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Act, or ASIO Act, clarifying that decisions made under this act are not 'prescribed administrative action' for the purposes of ASIO's security assessment framework. This ensures that security advice feeding into a ministerial decision under this scheme is treated consistently with that decision itself, rather than subject to a separate and potentially conflicting review pathway.

Every one of these changes was tested against the same question that the Huxtable review was asked to answer—that is, does the scheme's current settings match where the real risk actually sits? Six years of operation shows us the risk is concentrated in a small number of arrangements that warrant close and ongoing scrutiny. The volume sits overwhelmingly in low-risk, long-running relationships that were being processed as if they carried the same risk profile as everything else. This bill fixes this mismatch and gets the balance right. It enables seizing the benefits of upside while minimising the downside risks.

For a place like the Northern Territory, getting that balance right matters more than most. We are, geographically and economically, one of the most internationally engaged parts of this country. Our proximity to our regional partners and friends shapes almost everything we do. Our university, our government—the NT government—and our councils will keep building those international partnerships because they bring international students, researchers and trading relationships to the Top End that our territory genuinely needs. They should be able to do that without unnecessary friction on the arrangements that, plainly, warrant none. This bill gets out of the way of good arrangements with a reasonable and low-risk profile, while increasing risk mitigation on those for which that is not the case.

This bill is not a retreat from international engagement or the Commonwealth's stymieing it, and it is not built on the premise that every foreign partnership or deal is problematic. Our Labor federal government has been revitalising our relationships in the region, and progressing and driving the development and enhancement of our relationships all over the world, and that work is continuing. The government has been explicit through this whole process that the value of these partnerships is real—economically, culturally and strategically—and that the scheme exists to protect that value, not to discourage it.

A framework that made every low risk-arrangement as burdensome as a genuinely sensitive one would not make this country safer. It would teach state and territory entities to see Commonwealth oversight as an obstacle rather than as a safeguard, which it is. That is precisely the wrong lesson for a scheme that depends on good-faith cooperation from the jurisdiction it covers. This bill gets that balance right.

The last thing that we need in jurisdictions like mine, in Darwin and Palmerston in the Northern Territory, is for the balance not to be got right. What our experience in the Northern Territory also shows is that inappropriate decisions made at a sub-federal government and sub-federal parliamentary level can be problematic, so we need to make sure that those risks are managed appropriately. This bill gets that balance right, and I commend it to the House.

Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

On 1 January 1901, a Tuesday, the Commonwealth of Australia came into official existence. What happened on that day was six British colonies united to form a single independent nation. That was, in the history of this country, a red-letter day, a very important day. The Parliamentary Education Office tells us this, under the heading 'The Federation of Australia':

Australia's Federation came about through a process of deliberation, consultation and debate.

They are important things. It goes on:

The colonies were almost like 6 separate countries. For example, each had its own government and laws, its own defence force, issued its own stamps and collected tariffs—taxes—on goods that crossed its borders. The colonies had even built railways using different gauges, which complicated the transport of people and goods across the continent.

Goodness knows, we're still suffering the effects of some of those things. Statehood is still alive and well even though we are very much 125-plus years on.

But this bill, Australia's Foreign Relations (State and Territory Arrangements) Amendment Bill 2026, is a good piece of legislation in as much as our states need to know that, when it comes to foreign affairs, foreign relations, international treaties and the like, it is the Commonwealth, Canberra, the federal government that should and must have the most say so. Australia needs not many but a single coherent foreign policy, including when the territories and states, councils and public universities are engaging internationally, not just for Australia's sake but for their sake.

Most engagements that are conducted are overwhelmingly positive, but there can be problems when and where foreign actors perhaps maliciously, deliberately or otherwise influence Australian institutions in ways that go against our national interest. And we can't have that. I heard the member for Solomon say sensible governments decide on this policy, and he's quite right. It was the former coalition government which established the Foreign Arrangements Scheme in 2020. The Commonwealth does need visibility of significant foreign arrangements and the means to act where Australia's interests are threatened.

We live in a very volatile world. We live in a world in which foreign actors, malicious or otherwise, can very much interfere in the good governance of our country, Australia. We all well remember the Victorian Labor government signing up to China's Belt and Road Initiative. At the time the Commonwealth had limited ability to ensure that that agreement aligned with Australia's foreign policy. Do you think that mattered to the then premier of Victoria, Daniel Andrews? Do you think he cared? Not a jot; no way. But the Commonwealth coalition fixed that gap. The scheme was established, and Victoria's BRI agreement was subsequently cancelled in April 2021.

That hasn't stopped Mr Andrews going overseas and cosying up with his buddies in Beijing. It hasn't stopped a statue being proposed, made of bronze, in his honour on or near Spring Street. But since then, since the Commonwealth stepped in, as it rightly should have, more than 18,000 arrangements have been notified and more than 14,000 have been found to fall within the scheme. The scheme has given the Commonwealth proper and justifiable oversight over foreign arrangements that simply didn't exist before. It didn't happen before the coalition put in place the Foreign Arrangements Scheme in 2020. Five years of operation have shown that the scheme could be better targeted, and this is why the government is now doing what it is doing with this bill.

Too much effort has been spent processing arrangements that posed little or no genuine risk to our foreign interest. Around 92 per cent of core arrangements and about three-quarters of what would be non-core arrangements did not require complicated, complex and intricate oversight or assessment. Many were routine, including student credit transfers, fair enough; sister city arrangements, okay; ordinary educational engagement, fair enough.

But, over those not covered by what I just mentioned, the Commonwealth must have jurisdiction. You can't have a premier, such as Mr Andrews, running off on a folly, pretending to be Australia's spokesperson and representative and making arrangements to suit himself or his own state. That is why Victoria's dealings with the BRI were brought into question. That is why, ultimately, the deal was cancelled.

Cassandra Fernando (Holt, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

It being 1.30, the debate is interrupted. The member for Riverina will have leave to continue when the debate is resumed.

Sitting suspended from 13:30 to 15:59

Ash Ambihaipahar (Barton, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Australia's Foreign Relations (State and Territory Arrangements) Amendment Bill 2026. At its core, this bill is about something that is both incredibly important and increasingly complex: how Australia engages with the rest of the world. Australia's international relationships are not conducted only in Canberra. They are built in our universities and research institutions. They are built through trade and investment. They are built through cultural exchanges, sporting relationships and education. They are built by local governments, state governments and public universities, working with partners overseas. They are built every day by Australians themselves—and that is particularly true in a place like Barton.

When I think about my electorate, I don't see international relations as something that exists somewhere far away from the people I represent. I see it in Hurstville; I see it in Kingsgrove, Roselands, Bexley and Rockdale. I see it in the businesses that trade with people from overseas. I see it in the students whose families have come from every corner of the world. I see it in the community organisations celebrating Lunar New Year, Diwali, Eid, Christmas, and cultural festivals from across the globe. I see it also in the countless families in Barton whose connections extend across borders.

Our multiculturalism is one of Australia's greatest strengths. It's a strength economically, it's a strength socially and it's a strength diplomatically. The relationships Australians maintain with their countries of heritage can help build understanding and connection between Australia and the wider world.

For me, this is not an academic suggestion. I grew up in a multicultural community in southern Sydney. I grew up around my Sri Lankan family and Maltese and Italian families and many others. I know what it means to have family connections that stretch across countries and cultures. I know that those connections do not weaken our Australian identity; they strengthen it.

That is why, when we talk about foreign engagement, we should be careful not to confuse openness with naivety. Australia should be open to the world, but we should also be clear-eyed about our national interest. We should also welcome international partnerships that create jobs, support research, strengthen our communities and expand opportunity. At the same time, we need appropriate safeguards for when an arrangement could create risks for Australia's foreign relations or security or our broader national interest.

That balance is what this bill is about. We are living through a period of significant global challenge and contest, and the international environment is more complex than it was when the Foreign Arrangements Scheme was introduced in 2020. Strategic competition has intensified. Technology has changed the way countries and institutions interact. Economic relationships can have strategic consequences. Universities and research institutions operate across borders. Governments at every level increasingly engage internationally.

In that environment, we need a framework that is capable of recognising both the opportunities and the risks. The Foreign Arrangements Scheme was introduced in 2020 to provide visibility and oversight of arrangements entered into by state and territory governments, local governments and public universities with foreign entities. The purpose was straightforward. Australia can have many governments and many institutions engaging internationally, but we must have one coherent national foreign policy. That's an important principle, and it's a principle that has become particularly relevant over the recent years.

When an Australian state or territory government enters into an arrangement with a foreign government, it can have implications that extend well beyond that state or territory. That is why there needs to be a national framework. It is not about preventing states, territories or local governments from engaging internationally; it's about making sure that engagement happens consistent with Australia's national interest. Indeed, this is where I think the reforms before us get that balance right.

The government commissioned an independent review of the Foreign Arrangements Scheme in 2024, led by Rosemary Huxtable AO, PSM, and the review consulted widely across federal, state, territory and local governments, as well as Australian universities. The conclusion was not that the scheme was fundamentally broken—quite the opposite. The review found that the scheme was working but that it could be improved. It needed to better target genuine risks. It needed clearer definitions. It needed to reduce unnecessary complexity. And it needed to make compliance more proportionate. The government accepted all 23 recommendations of the review, either in full or in principle.

This bill implements those recommendations that require legislative change, and that is good policy making. We should not legislate simply for the sake of legislating; we should listen, we should understand reviews and we should identify what is working and what is not, and then we should improve the system. This is precisely what this bill does.

The bill places national interest more clearly at the centre of decision-making, because Australia's national interest is broader than simply asking whether something technically affects our foreign relations. Our national interest encompasses our security, our economic prosperity, our sovereign capability, our international standing, our research and education systems and the strength and resilience of our communities.

The bill also strengthens risk management by allowing conditions to be imposed on arrangements. That is an important improvement, because regulation should not always be binary; it should not be a case of saying either 'yes' or 'no'. Sometimes the appropriate response is to say 'yes, but with safeguards'. That is a much more sophisticated approach to regulation, and it reflects the reality of international engagement.

We also need to recognise that not every international arrangement carries the same level of risk. A local government cultural exchange with an overseas municipality should not necessarily be treated in the same way as a strategic arrangement involving critical infrastructure, sensitive research or a foreign government department. Good regulation should distinguish between those things, and that is why I welcome the bill's risk based approach. It reduces unnecessary approval and notification requirements for lower risk arrangements while strengthening oversight where the risks are greater.

That is not deregulation for its own sake. It is better regulation. It means that government can focus its attention and resources where they're actually needed. This is particularly important for our public universities. Australian universities are some of our greatest international assets. They attract students from across the world. They collaborate with researchers internationally, they contribute to scientific discovery, they build networks between countries and they support Australian jobs and economic activity. We should never lose sight of that.

International education and research collaboration are not merely economic transactions. They build relationships with people. A student who comes to Australia to study does not simply receive a qualification. They build friendships, they develop professional networks, they experience Australian society and they take those experiences back into the world. That is soft power, that is diplomacy and that is part of Australia's national interest. The bill recognises this while also ensuring that contemporary forms of international engagement are appropriately captured, and that includes arrangements involving overseas campuses of Australian universities. The world has changed considerably since 2020, and our legislation needs to keep pace.

But there is another important part of this bill that I just want to acknowledge, and that is that it improves information sharing and whole-of-government coordination. We should not have different parts of government operating in silos when assessing arrangements that may have implications on our national interest. Foreign policy, trade, education, research and national security are increasingly interconnected. A decision made in one part of government can have consequences elsewhere. Better information sharing means better decisions, and better decisions mean stronger protections for Australian interests.

The bill also improves compliance arrangements. Importantly, it introduces more proportionate mechanisms for dealing with inadvertent breaches. That is common sense. A regulatory framework should distinguish between deliberate attempts to circumvent the law and an honest mistake made in circumstances where the requirements were unclear. Compliance should be taken seriously, but fairness and proportionality should be taken seriously too.

The bill also seeks to make the public register more accurate, transparent and useful. That matters because transparency builds trust. Australians should be able to understand what arrangements are being entered into and how those arrangements are being managed. But transparency also needs to be meaningful. A register that is technically comprehensive but difficult to understand is not particularly useful. The reforms before us seek to make the system clearer and more usable, and that is a welcome improvement.

As someone who has previously served in local government, particularly at Georges River Council, I also appreciate the practical importance of getting this right. Local governments are increasingly connected to the world. Councils engage in sister city relationships. They participate in international cultural and economic exchanges. They host delegations. They support multicultural communities. They build relationships that can create opportunities for local businesses, students and community organisations, and these activities can be incredibly valuable.

But local councils should not be expected to navigate an unnecessarily complex Commonwealth regulatory framework for every low-risk international interaction. The answer is not to shut the door; the answer is to have clear rules about when the Commonwealth needs to be involved. That is the balance this bill seeks to achieve and that balance is particularly relevant for my electorate of Barton.

My electorate is one of the most culturally diverse communities in Australia. People in Barton have family, cultural and educational and commercial connections across the globe. Local businesses in Barton are part of international supply chains. Students participate in an education system that attracts people from around the world, and community organisations in Barton maintain connections with diaspora communities and institutions overseas.

When international relationships work well, the benefits are felt locally. They can mean jobs. They can mean investment. They can mean new research. They can mean educational opportunities. They can mean stronger cultural understanding. But when international engagement is poorly managed, the consequences can also be felt locally. That's why we need a framework that is open to opportunity while protecting Australia's interests. I think that principle can be summed up quite simply: we should not build walls around Australia; we should build strong foundations for Australia's engagement with the world. That means being confident in who we are. It means understanding that multiculturalism is Australia's strength. It means welcoming international students and researchers. It means supporting Australian businesses to engage with the global market. It means maintaining strong relationships with our partners, and it also means having the national safeguards necessary to protect Australia's sovereignty, security and foreign policy.

As Foreign Minister Wong has said, Australia's international partnerships are a source of real strength, and I really agree with that. But partnerships are strongest when they are built on clarity, trust and an understanding of each other's interests. This bill gives us a clearer framework for achieving that. It modernises the Foreign Arrangements Scheme and places the national interest at the centre. It strengthens risk management and improves coordination. It captures contemporary forms of international engagement and, more importantly, it reduces unnecessary administrative burden for lower risk arrangements, and that is sensible reform. It recognises that Australia's international engagement is not something to be feared; it is something to be managed wisely.

As the member for Barton, I represent, as I said, a very diverse community, a community that knows better than most of Australia we are part of a much bigger world. Our diversity is evidence of that. Our families are evidence of that. Our businesses are evidence of that. Our universities are evidence of that, and our future is definitely that too. We should remain open to the world, but being open does not mean being careless, being confident does not mean being complacent, and protecting our national interests does not mean turning our back on international cooperation. The challenge for governments is to hold those things together, and that is what responsible government does.

This bill strikes that balance and it keeps Australia open to international engagement while ensuring that the engagement is consistent with our national interest. It strengthens the safeguards where the risks are real while removing unnecessary barriers where the risks are low. It ensures that, as the international environment becomes more complex, Australia's framework for foreign arrangements remains fit for purpose. For those reasons, I support this bill.

Matt Smith (Leichhardt, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on Australia's Foreign Relations (State and Territory Arrangements) Amendment Bill 2026. Australia and Australians more broadly are pretty bloody good. The flag that's flying proudly above this place right now means something right around the world. Across the luggage of backpackers, people see that flag and they smile because they know that attached to that flag is an Australian. Walk into any pub all across the world and lead with, 'G'day.' You're going to strike up a conversation. You're going to find some new mates. People are interested in us. They want to be around us. They want to invest in us. And why wouldn't they?

Our sport's amazing. We export our best leagues to New Zealand. They're not very good at it, but it's fine. They get to play along sometimes. We are becoming more and more the hub of the South Pacific and the hub of South-East Asia. The opportunities that are being presented to us by improvements in travel, improvements in technology and the way the world is becoming more and more interconnected are really putting Australia in the box seat going into this century. Our critical minerals in abundance, right throughout the far north and across the west, are going to make us a world leader. This is something to be excited about. This is something to really get behind, which we can do as a nation.

But we need guardrails because so many people are interested in us. It's coming across at all different levels of government now, as well as public universities and public institutions. Everybody wants a piece of Australia. Everybody wants to be on our team. It's a good problem to have, but the guardrails are important. Sometimes you lose sight of things. Stuff can slip away. Occasionally—hopefully not often—there are bad actors trying to infiltrate us.

This bill seeks to improve the existing legislation to ensure that things move smoothly, with better coordination and better cooperation right across so that we can all take advantage of the opportunities that are presented to us. That includes public universities. Cairns and the far north are home to two world-class institutions: CQUniversity and JCU. Both have overseas campuses. That's great, because we are training, from the South Pacific to Asia, the future engineers, the doctors and the nurses. The leaders of those countries will have been educated by an Australian institution, and that's exciting. We already train a large part of their defence forces, particularly from the South Pacific, and policing. Everybody comes here. We send our knowledge back out into the world, and that's something to be proud of. It's something about which, as a nation, we can hold our head up high. People talk about middle powers. We are a strong middle power, and we are a leader in our region. We lead through kindness, through generosity, through training, through identifying where our relationships can get stronger and stepping into that breach, and through being the shoulders or the ears and then being able to promote the voice of the South Pacific—in particular, very small islands. They need somebody there. We are that person. We are the superpower of the South Pacific. It's not a bad place to be.

So, when we're out there promoting ourselves, providing this opportunity and showing the world what Australia is, we can do it with confidence that everyone is singing from the same song sheet and that, right across the country, everybody knows this is what Australia is and Australia stands for. These things are in our national interest. Things like the sister cities are fantastic. They show the world what we're capable of. They show our compassion, our friendship and our ability to take people in from all cultures right around the world and give them that time and that mateship. Mateship is more than a word to Australia. When people have an interaction with Australians, they understand that mateship is almost a state of mind. It's a place where you go where the friendship is deeper. It means: 'I'm with you no matter what. I'll support you through thick and thin.' That's what it means to be Australian, and that's what is so attractive to the rest of the world.

When this was commissioned in 2024, led by Rosemary Huxtable, the complexity and the unclearness of it were really what held it back, and that's why we're in this position today. It's why we are speaking on this bill. To simplify things, particularly when you're dealing across governments and across organisations, is tricky. We as the federal government have entire departments to speak to—Foreign Affairs and Trade, DFAT. Amazing. We can get advice from anybody at all times.

The mayor of Cook Shire doesn't have that opportunity, but they want to reach out. They want to expand their horizons. They want to bring people into Cook Shire to work on the farms, to work in the pubs, to work in aged care and to develop that understanding of what it means to live in outback and rural Australia, to understand the regions, so that someone from Beijing might have an idea of what it means to live in the proper bush, in the cape, where the roads are dirt and the rivers get up real fast.

I've been to Beijing. I was there playing. You can't see the stars. If you come from a place like that to the outback, to the cape—or really anywhere in Australia—and you look up and you see the Milky Way for the first time, what an opportunity! What a gift! I was out Yass way on the weekend—no light pollution. You can reach up and touch the stars. I've grown up with the stars, and it was beautiful. If you've never seen them before, if you've never experienced that majesty, you can do it here and you can do it by us improving our relations with countries and letting them understand.

A lot of people are looking to us for leadership. They want to bring their money here. They want to bring their economic values here. They want to bring the world to Australia, and Australia needs to go out to the world. We are an island, but we can't be an island anymore. Economically, that doesn't make sense. Culturally, that doesn't make sense. Socially, that doesn't make sense. But to make it a free-for-all in a world that's changing so rapidly, with tech giants, with bad-faith actors, with a couple of wars going on—without guidelines, without guardrails, it leaves us open to problems, open to things that we didn't anticipate, and we can't compromise our sovereignty in such a fashion.

The sovereignty of Australia is paramount to our position in the rest of the world. The uniqueness of the Australian way of life, the uniqueness of the Australian attitude, has to be protected. Our intellectual property and our infrastructure have to be Australian. This sets down those clear guidelines so that, right across the country, everyone understands where the no-go zones are. And it sends a message not just locally but internationally as well. With those guardrails legislated and put down in law, other countries know where that no-go zone is as well, and they will steer clear of it.'

People watch this. People see us. Our words in here matter, our actions in here matter, not just locally but on a global scale. Be we backbenchers, ministers or prime ministers, everything we say is out there, able to be picked up and disseminated across the world in record time. Everyone watches, whether they be good or indifferent or seek to do us harm. By putting forth these rules, those who maybe do seek to do us harm know we're not to be messed with. 'These are the rules. These are the rules that we play by. These are the rules that we expect you to play by. And, if we do so, then we can have a truly mutually beneficial arrangement. You will give us your best and brightest, and we will return to you doctors, engineers, leaders, nurses, governance. You give us your best and brightest, and we will develop technologies, we will cure diseases, we will make a difference.'

The work being done in the Far North around tuberculosis and with Wolbachia bacteria—which deal with dengue fever—is world leading. It saves lives. That's something that we should be proud of. That's something that we should give to the world. That's something that we need the world to help us with so that we can ensure that our world-leading intellectuals, our world-leading scientists, have access to all sorts of different things.

I spoke today with Southern Cross University, and they're working on a program right now for cloud brightening. Cloud brightening is essentially sucking up seawater and putting in nanocrystals of salt—74 trillion, I'm led to believe. I don't know who counted them. They spray them up into the clouds. The light then reflects off the salt crystals back into space. What that does is provide a cooling mechanism for the Great Barrier Reef in times of stress. This is being partially funded by Southern Cross University, but it's also partly funded by ARIA, which is from the British government. They see Australian ingenuity, and they want to be a part of it. They don't only see what it does for the Great Barrier Reef; it can protect the Arctic, the Antarctic and the glaciers. We can get the world looking at what we've got. They want to invest.

This is just one of the thousands and thousands of success stories celebrating what we're capable of. Wi-fi—that's Australian. I'm celebrating Australian stuff right now. You know what? I love it. We do some really good things. Something as simple as making the clouds brighter thought up by an Australian—his name's Dan. He's great. He lives down at Coffs Harbour. He likes to go diving, and he likes to go surfing. He found a problem. There were a whole bunch of other different ideas. He's worked through them all. He's decided this is the one, and the world is investing in it.

We talk about the cultural cringe that used to be a part of the Australian culture. That's gone now. We're world leading in all sorts of things. I'm so proud of that. We should all be so proud of that. I think we should all occasionally take stock of where Australia sits in the world and why Australia sits in the world. It's because of people like Dan, and it's because of people like that who came before him. It's because of the outreach done by the Prime Minister and the Minister for Foreign Affairs to make sure that Australia's reputation is solid in the region and solid right around the world. It's giving us a chance to be the best version of ourselves. If we become insular and take our eyes off the world around us, we don't necessarily get the benefit. I know that the world's looking to us, and I know that we're looking back out at the world. This is just going to make it so much easier for everybody to do so.

You don't want people out there unable or unsure because, if they go too far and they make a mistake, the book gets thrown at them. That's a very real fear for a lot of people. This simplifies that. Everyone will have a clear, precise understanding of exactly where the guardrails are. Get up to them, but don't cross them. That's a really important part, giving that flexibility and that compassion, because people do make mistakes. Legislation is complicated, and—if you are coming from a smaller council, a university or any public institution and you don't have that experience in foreign affairs or foreign diplomacy—it's easy to make an error.

People shouldn't be punished for that, because all they're trying to do is take what makes Australia great and show it to the rest of the world. I'm excited by what this bill means, and what it means is Australia being shown off. I think everybody in this House is excited by the prospect of this country being shown off. I know how proud every single member in here is because they wouldn't be here if they weren't. They've put their hand up, and they've said: 'This is my country. This is our country. We're damn proud of it, and we're going to show it to the rest of the world. We are going to take what makes Australia special and give that to everybody else.' I commend the bill to the House.

Matt Thistlethwaite (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Immigration) | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank members for their contributions to this debate. Australia's prosperity and security in international standing are strengthened by international partnerships entered into by our states, territories, local governments and universities, and the government encourages and supports that engagement. Whether they're in research, education, trade, culture or other fields, these connections deliver substantial benefits to communities across Australia.

As the House has recognised, international engagement now takes place in a more complex strategic environment than was the case even a decade ago. That's why Australia requires a framework that supports beneficial engagements whilst ensuring that risk to our foreign policy and broader national interests can be identified and managed appropriately. The Foreign Arrangements Scheme has fulfilled that role since 2020. The independent review of the foreign relations act concluded that the scheme has provided an effective mechanism for visibility of foreign arrangements. It's enabled subnational governments and universities to continue pursuing international opportunities with confidence. At the same time, the review identified opportunities to improve the scheme's operation, reduce unnecessary burden and better focus regulatory efforts on areas of greater risk.

The reforms before the House are practical, measured and proportionate in the ways that they achieve their objectives. They strengthen the framework by ensuring decisions are guided by a broader conception of Australia's national interest, including national security, economic security, foreign policy and broader strategic considerations. The reforms provide more flexible tools for managing risk. They improve whole-of-government coordination through a carefully designed information-sharing framework and ensure that the scheme remains capable of responding to evolving forms of international engagement. At the same time, the bill reduces unnecessary regulation. These changes will make the scheme easier to navigate and administer whilst maintaining appropriate oversight. Importantly, the bill reflects the principle that regulatory effort should be directed where it is most needed. I commend the bill to the House.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.