A review of Australia’s law on sub-national foreign relations has erred in suggesting that universities should face less scrutiny over their transnational education programs.
The legislative proposal comes just as Australian universities and China’s party-system are both rushing into more of these deals, each side for different reasons but with far-reaching implications for the institutional autonomy and worldview of Australian higher education.
The inquiry reviewed the Foreign Relations (State and Territory Arrangements) Act, 2020, and the government released the report on 1 September.
The act was designed to restore federal oversight of international relations by requiring state and local governments, universities and public institutions to notify and seek approval for foreign agreements. Its immediate trigger was the Victorian government’s 2018 Belt and Road deal with China, but that agreement was only the most visible product of a decade in which subnational governments and universities had entered into foreign partnerships at such a pace that Canberra risked losing control of foreign policy, with direct implications for national sovereignty.
The review offers a wealth of data. More than 14,000 agreements have been reported under the Act, 43 percent of them with China—three times as many as with the United States, the next closest country. Since the law took effect, state and local government agreements have dropped from 20 percent to just 12 percent of the total. The data shows that China is the most active foreign initiator of subnational and institutional agreements, and the Australian university sector is the most active domestic participant.
These arrangements are largely research collaborations and articulation programs in transnational education (TNE). Through them, Chinese students complete joint degrees, Australian degrees taught entirely in China, or programs that begin in China and finish on an Australian campus.
The review concludes that most TNE agreements are low risk and administratively burdensome under the act, recommending reduced oversight. It also highlights inconsistencies around the definition of foreign universities as state entities, and the unclear line between ‘core’ and ‘non-core’ foreign arrangements. What the act cannot capture are wider policy shifts in higher education—both in Australia and in China—that shape the environment in which these agreements operate.
The timing of this recommendation comes at the worst time. Australia’s cap on onshore international student numbers, enforced through visa restrictions, has meant universities are turning to TNE to maintain fee revenue.
At the same time, Beijing has its own TNE policy system, which it calls ‘Chinese-Foreign Cooperation in Running Schools’. This is explicitly designed to integrate foreign universities into China’s education system. Its stated purpose is to take the teaching expertise of foreign institutions while protecting Chinese students from Western liberal values.
This year, Beijing has strengthened that system, encouraging Chinese universities to enter into new joint ventures with foreign partners. Australian academics and university leaders are receiving a surge of outreach from Chinese counterparts, coinciding with universities’ own financial imperatives and occurring just as legislative oversight may be weakened.
On top of all that, the Victorian government on Monday signed an agreement to establish a joint Victoria–China education policy system that advances Beijing’s goal of integration in education. This is exactly the kind of subnational initiative the act was intended to restrain.
The other key safeguard, the higher education regulator, has not been attentive. The regulator, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, maintains that Australian degrees must uphold Australian values wherever they are delivered. Yet the reality is that Australian degrees taught in China devote roughly one-third of their curriculums to compulsory Communist Party and military education, delivered by Chinese staff. Australian academics, usually in science and engineering, fly in for limited teaching blocks and receive ad hoc advice on which topics to avoid. Degree transcripts either neglect to mention the party courses or rebrand them with bland titles such as ‘civics’. Because most of these programs are in science and engineering, in accordance with Beijing’s national development goals, the Australian staff do not come up against politically sensitive topics very often and the Australian universities can look the other way.
The implications extend beyond classrooms. By embedding themselves in China’s higher education system, the leadership and governance structures of Australian universities become socialised into Chinese policy norms and values. They uncritically take on key ideas about China’s national development goals and begin to accept ideological red lines. This potentially reshapes outlooks in ways that diverge from Australia’s democratic principles and foreign policy settings, including Australia’s policy on Taiwan.
The review may be right that the act is an imperfect instrument for managing these risks. But the act remains the strongest tool Australia currently has. Weakening it without putting in place credible alternatives would leave universities more deeply enmeshed in a system explicitly designed to harness their expertise while subordinating them to Beijing’s political priorities. If the government chooses to roll back the act, it must at the same time establish new safeguards that directly confront China’s ambitions for Australia’s role within its higher education system.