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September 1, 2026
GARY HARDGRAVE: Shadow Minister for Defence, Senator James Paterson, joins us. Senator, are you concerned about this? Because I am.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Great to be with you, mate. Yes. Thank you for your interest in this really important story. The shocking thing about this is none of it's new. Five years ago, I chaired a parliamentary inquiry on the intelligence committee, which looked into the foreign interference risks at Australian universities, and it uncovered many similar stories to the ones we've been reading, particularly in The Australian newspaper by Natasha Bita over the last couple of months. And it's the same naivety on behalf of Australian universities and their researchers and the same complacency on behalf of the government failing to act when sensitive national security research with military applications is being done with foreign authoritarian countries, including even universities that are directly linked, for example, to the People's Liberation Army in the People's Republic of China. That is just crazy in this dangerous strategic environment.
HARDGRAVE: Well, it is absolutely crazy because James Paterson, I can't follow this. We've got a thread of effort giving money to Pacific Island nations to keep China out. Let's cut to the chase, that's what it's all about. You've got some Pacific Island Nations not even going to the Pacific Island Forum where our Prime Minister is at right now in Palau. It seems like a beautiful place, I would like to go there one day. You've got us dealing with the Americans on strategic stuff, all about the South Pacific. You've got trade with China, and now we've got research collaboration using our taxpayer funds, basically giving the IP, the intellectual property, off to people who may want to take us over. I mean, this whole thing is madness. What's going on here?
PATERSON: It's complete madness. It's like different arms of the Australian government are funding two different sides in a conflict. One, the Australian side trying to win a contest with the PRC in the Pacific and the other, inadvertently, the PRC side of that contest, trying to hand over sensitive research to them that they could use against us in the future if they chose to do so. And I'm especially worried to hear that the Australian Research Council has been involved in this because that's a government-funded body. It hands out taxpayers' money for research to universities. And when they appeared before me as a witness on the Intelligence Committee five years ago, I thought they had a dangerously complacent attitude then to these risks. And I'm shocked to know that five years on, it appears nothing has changed. They are still handing out research, particularly in sensitive areas like drones, which are an inherently dual-use capability. They may have civilian and commercial uses, but they have obvious military applications as we've all seen in Ukraine, and Iran, and Gaza, and elsewhere. And Australian taxpayers are funding, apparently, research advancement for the Chinese military. It's just madness.
HARDGRAVE: Yeah, well, drones were attacking the United Arab Emirates in the last 24 hours yet again. I mean, this case, this one case that's jumping out at us, almost 600,000 taxpayers' dollars for an insect-inspired flying robot. We've all seen the movie, we've all seen Ant-Man, we really do. But the researcher involved says there's no evidence his research was transferred to the Chinese military, and yet the independent report into this. From Walker Munro, they've highlighted that foreign co-authors are now being added to the ARC, the Australian Research Council grant. It's approved. I mean, this is a ridiculously huge loophole.
PATERSON: And this is not a grey area. We should not be using Australian taxpayers' money to fund dual-use research with potential military applications with a foreign authoritarian country whose universities have no institutional autonomy, who ultimately report to the Chinese government, and in many cases are directly linked to the People's Liberation Army. It's eerily reminiscent of past cases where PLA researchers have done their PhDs in Australia on things like drone swarming and operating drones in GPS-denied environments, which are so obvious in their military applications but used to happen all the time, and I thought we'd learned the lesson from that. I thought we exposed that, we'd seen the problems and we wouldn't repeat it, but it is being repeated. It's being repeated on this government's watch, and frankly the Albanese government is not taking it seriously enough. These research collaborations should have been cancelled under the powers that the Education Minister has and under the powers that the Foreign Minister has.
HARDGRAVE: Well, the Prime Minister's puppet master, the Foreign Minister Penny Wong, she said there's nothing to see here, we've tightened the laws, that's enough. I mean, surely a parliamentary inquiry will just check the Foreign Minister's claims on this.
PATERSON: I think that is necessary, and particularly because a lot of these Australian universities also receive money from the Department of Defence to conduct very sensitive research for the Australian Defence Force, for capabilities for the ADF. And if a university doesn't have the judgement to realise it's a bad idea to cooperate with a Chinese military-linked university, then I have very real questions about whether they should be getting a cent of Australian taxpayers' money from the Defence Department to help our military. They've really got to demonstrate, if you want to work with the ADF, you work with the ADF alone. You don't work with the ADF and the PLA.
HARDGRAVE: I would have thought from a defence national security point of view, our affiliation with America should give us some signals, James Paterson. Should Australia actually mirror the US approach, maybe place an outright ban on Australian funded researchers collaborating with institutions linked to foreign defence or intelligence organs? I think that seems like the next step.
PATERSON: I think so too. I think the US has been very clear-eyed about this and they're very public about it, which is if you want to get money from the Pentagon, you can't work with these universities and these universities we assess to be linked to the Chinese military. Actually, we have our own Australian research on this as well. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute a number of years ago did a Chinese universities defence tracker. It maps out which universities are closely linked to the PLA and which ones are not. It's a freely available resource. Any university can look it up online and can make informed judgments about the risks, but also they can get much better access to intelligence than they could five or ten years ago. They can seek the advice and support of the Department of Home Affairs, of the University's Foreign Interference Task Force, of ASIO, and they can make informed judgments, and the fact that they're not really, really concerns me.
HARDGRAVE: Just ahead of the curve a bit, the US media tonight, or overnight, have been reporting that it is influence peddlers out of the Chinese government, out of The People's Liberation Army, basically, who are driving a whole bunch of bot, that is phoney identities on social media, driving an anti-data centre logic in America, and I would argue here in Australia. This kind of rant against data centres having Australian information stored on Australian soil is coming as a planned move to try and disorient the kind of use of AI we should be doing. Why? Because it's simple. China wants to do it, wants to do it all for us.
PATERSON: That's right. There is immense strategic advantage to be gained from winning the AI race and you can't win the AI race without computational power and you can't get computational power without building data centres. And countries like China but also Russia and Iran and North Korea and others know this and they want to slow down our adoption of this technology and they want to interfere with it. Now we've got to acknowledge there are legitimate concerns about planning, and water use, and electricity use around data centres. But what these foreign authoritarian states do is they weaponise that legitimate grievance with bots and other interference through social media to amplify it and blow it out of proportion. And a solvable problem about putting in proper planning and proper control so communities have a say gets whipped into a fervour that stops Australia taking advantage of an enormous economic and strategic opportunity.
HARDGRAVE: This is an undeclared war, James Paterson. We're in an undeclared war right now through the use of this kind of internet technology.
PATERSON: It's sometimes called the grey zone, where particularly foreign authoritarian states are very adept at undermining democracies by looking for weaknesses in what they see as democracies, which is our freedom of speech, our open debate, our free conversations, and they try and weaponise those. And they're very adept at using technology to do that. They use platforms, including Western headquartered social media platforms, but also platforms that are headquartered in their own jurisdictions like TikTok and WeChat. And they use them to try and influence our public conversation and shape the choices we make as democracies, and we have to be very alert to this to make sure that it's Australians making sovereign choices about our future and not a foreign state dictating them to us.
HARDGRAVE: Yeah, well said. Good on you. Thank you for your time, Senator James Paterson, Shadow Minister for Defence.
ENDS