A missed opportunity: amending the Defence Trade Controls Act 2012 (Cth) and research security

Résumé 0

Since the AUKUS Agreement was signed in 2021, there has been an ambitious reform agenda intended to align Australian export control laws with those of the US to ensure license-free exports of military and dual-use technologies upon which both Pillars of the AUKUS Agreement could be reliant. However, the Commonwealth government has missed a golden opportunity, by failing to contemplate how those export control reforms could be used to truly provide for safe and secure conduct of cutting-edge research in higher education institutions. The notion of “research security”—that is, “safeguarding the research enterprise against the misappropriation of research and development to the detriment of national or economic security, related violations of research integrity, and foreign government interference”—appears to have been far from the minds of Parliament. This paper engages in a criticism of Australian export controls from the perspective of research security, highlighting aspects of the framework which fall short of protecting our institutions from malign foreign actors. Several recommendations are also made about potential opportunities for future reform that have broader application than just the Australian context and could be adopted by other jurisdictions looking to tighten their own research security frameworks.