The Albanese government seems to be in a spending mood for high technology. It has recently announced A$1 billion for the to build quantum computers in Brisbane. from 2024-25 will be offered through the Medical Research Future Fund. And A$22.7 billion has been set aside over the next decade for its new green technology initiative.
Universities will play a massive role within those schemes. The trouble is that every bit of research they do will result in a financial loss to them.
Competitive research grants don’t actually cover the real cost of doing research, forcing universities . Indeed, unlike any other developed economy, Australian universities actually than the government does. And the way they afford that, of course, is international student fees.
Across the sector and depending on the study, anywhere and at Australian universities is funded this way. So the more research you do, the more you need international students – which is why international numbers are in Group of Eight universities, which carry out of university research in Australia. The University of Queensland, for instance, earns 75 per cent of its total student income from international students.
But there are several major problems with this funding mechanism. First, any threat to the flow of international students – such as , domestic or changes in – poses a significant risk to university research solvency.
There are also adverse side effects of dependence on overseas income. When Australia tried to , for instance, we got taken for a ride, with ?by unscrupulous providers and students. Even more seriously, overseas students represent , and universities can enter into that can present risks that the technology, ideas and data generated could be diverted for nefarious purposes, such as or .
The caps on international students being introduced by the current government are not the solution because they could push overseas students into regional universities, which of their larger cousins. Indeed, as part of the research equation as things stand,?mostly leaving it to individual university researchers to identify such national security risks in their work – resulting in everything from to the .
Australia needs something like Canada’s C$125 million , which builds resilience and security measures into university research; the more research funding a university receives, the more research security is subsidised. But the only way to fundamentally break universities’ dependence on potentially hostile foreign powers is to properly fund their research activities.
Everybody, from itself to Nobel Laureate and former Australian National University vice-chancellor has called for this. The of the Universities Accord – which a “blueprint for the next decade and beyond” – says that “fully funded university research is a crucial objective for Australia’s universities”. In particular, the Accord calls for “universities [to] charge and government and industry [to] pay” the full cost of doing research in this country.
That is going to cost this government – or the next one – a pretty penny, given is not a viable option. But whether that means a ,?or incentivising revenue streams from within Australia or our close allies, the government needs to find the money somehow.
Otherwise, the that research offers to productivity can only be realised at the cost of national security risks, wrangles over immigration settings and the reduction of universities from institutions that pursue and share knowledge as a public good to simply to exist.
Brendan Walker-Munro is senior lecturer in law at Southern Cross University. This article expresses only his personal view.
