The Defence Trade Controls Amendment Bill 2023 is with the Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Legislation Committee. Defence Minister Richard Marles says the Bill “will unlock billions of dollars in investment and cut red tape.”
It might with the US and UK submarine partners, but not so much anybody else. The intent is to exempt goods and services on the defence list going to the UK and US from having permits, which are needed elsewhere.
The Senate inquiry has provided researchers unhappy with the Bill with a new opportunity to campaign against the Department of Defence, which always appears keen to expand oversight of research on its patch. In 2018, DoD’s original ambit for a rewrite of the Defence Trade Control Act included an amendment “to allow the Australian Government to more effectively control access to Defence and Strategic Goods List technology and other technology that may be used to prejudice the security, defence or international relations of Australia.”
And now the proposed all-but AUKUS exclusion zone worries universities and research lobbies, which argue the new rules will make it harder to work with the rest of the world – sharing research in tech fields requiring an export licence.
But it’s not as bad as it was. The Senate inquiry comes at the end of long discussions and the research establishment has already extracted concessions, including an HE working group to align export controls with those that apply to US and UK universities.
However, Lobbies are still trying to have controls reduced, on the general principle that a Senate inquiry is too good a platform not to use.
Some are ambitious, like the Australian Technology Network’s call for an exemption for basic scientific research – it could be hard to define where bench-work stops and battlefield development starts, although the Group of Eight suggests a distinction, work that would normally be published and research with results restricted for “proprietary reasons”.
However, learned academies (technology and engineering, science) see an opportunity, saying the Bill will require new government-funded research institutions, in a middle space between universities conducting open research and defence projects, and that “It should not and cannot be the responsibility of universities and research institutes to fund the creation of secure or restricted research and development environments.”
QUT, wise in the ways Defence works, makes a practical case for changing the Bill’s rules on issuing research permits for projects ex-AUKUS, “consultations with the Department of Defence have produced the clear impression that the very substantial prospective demand for permits under the proposed regime is radically underestimated by the government.”
And the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (third funded by DoD) nails it. “To the degree that exceptions, carve-outs and special cases complicate compliance for Australian small and medium enterprises, benefits from the reform will rapidly diminish.”
The Committee is set to report end April.
