Excessive secrecy in Australian security circles is fostering an all-or-nothing mentality that undermines natural justice and exacerbates security risks, according to an expert.
Brendan Walker-Munro said a code of silence kept universities in the dark over their legitimate security issues. Staff from the government’s security agency, Asio, often wanted to offer guidance but were “hamstrung” by the organisation’s “incredibly strong” secrecy provisions.
“Universities…have been asking and even begging the government [for] more clarity,” he said. “The intelligence services…want to get this right and to help as much as they can. But it’s nowhere near as tailored as the universities are asking for and probably actually need.”
A string of unexplained prohibitions involving Asio – including the vetoing of five Australian Research Council grants, the cancellation of two Chinese scholars’ visas and delays in the processing of hundreds of foreign doctoral students’ visa applications – has left universities and their staff jumping at shadows.
Research with and about China has plummeted, largely because bureaucrats within universities have discouraged it. UNSW Sydney’s Canberra campus has reportedly banned all collaborative research with China.
Dr Walker-Munro, a senior lecturer at Southern Cross University and a former head of investigations and enforcement at several government agencies, said a lack of detailed advice on national security issues was forcing the sector to impose blanket bans rather than scrutinising the specific risks.
Meanwhile, other potential risks went unnoticed, with no systematic checks on whether students returning from exchanges in authoritarian countries had been approached by intelligence agencies or if their phones had been infected with malware.
Academics often shrugged off suggestions of security risks as “plots from James Bond novels” rather than thinking through the potential hazards to their intellectual property, their universities’ reputations and their personal safety, Dr Walker-Munro said.
“The question isn’t necessarily about…the collaboration itself; it’s what the collaboration is about. It would really help [universities] to have a much closer conversation with government,” he said.
Dr Walker-Munro said Australia should “cherry-pick” overseas initiatives such as the UK’s Research Collaboration Advice Team. Its government-employed staff can request classified information from intelligence agencies and apprise universities of “the nature of the risk” – without divulging sensitive details such as sources – so that the institutions have “some fundamental concrete guidance that they can run with”.
“We don’t have that in Australia. The best we have is a set of voluntary guidelines that don’t have any baselines, aren’t audited and aren’t monitored. [The University Foreign Interference Taskforce guidelines are] a good starting point, but there’s so much more that we could be doing,” he said.
Australian National University (ANU) geopolitical analyst Rory Medcalf said discussions about national security were mired in “secrecy, political caution and the coded vocabulary of the insider”.
Professor Medcalf, head of the ANU’s National Security College, told an April conference that the country’s strategic challenges warranted a more “inclusive” conversation. “When it comes to the security landscape, the gap between what government knows and what it says needs to diminish, not widen,” he said.
Dr Walker-Munro said national security-related bans sometimes appeared arbitrary. Australians were told: “We think this person is a national security risk and, because of national security, we’re not going to tell you why.” This left the targets with no recourse and their institutions with no clarity. “Universities may have no idea why their proposed PhD student can’t get a visa,” he warned.
