Audio Excerpt - News Presenter:

“Concentration levels were high at Lockheed Martin’s headquarters in Canberra. Fingertips were tapping away at keyboards and eyes glued to screens, as 15 teams from around the nation battled it out at Code Quest.”

ANNA:

It's pretty fascinating to see photos of children with their code quest certificates standing in front of a Lockheed Martin banner.

Audio Excerpt - News Presenter:

“More businesses urged to host events similar to this.”

ANNA:

These are companies like Lockheed Martin, BAE, Raytheon, Boeing, they're all in there.
Basically providing STEM curriculum.

If you're making money off making weapons, you shouldn't be involved in delivering educational material. I think that’s a conversation that definitely needs to be had.

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ASHLYNNE:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ashlynne McGhee, this is 7AM.

For the past few months there’s been a lot of focus on universities’ relationships with weapons manufacturers.

Students set up camps and occupied buildings arguing that their universities are complicit in the assault on Gaza and demanding more transparency.

But as writer and contributor to The Saturday Paper, Anna Krien, started investigating the defence money flowing into education, she was startled to find weapons companies are involved in schools shaping key parts of the curriculum.

Australia can’t be a major defence player without a skilled defence industry, so are these trade offs we’re willing to live with?

Today, Anna Krien, on how the student protests revealed deep divisions in our education sector.
That’s after the break.

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ASHLYNNE:

Anna, you were watching as students at universities across the country occupied the grounds in protest over the last couple of months. Tell me about what's been happening.

ANNA:

Yeah, right. So there's been about a dozen or so student encampments across the country. Basically part of the, sort of, nationwide free Palestine protest movement.

Audio Excerpt - News Presenter 2:

“Tensions ran high in Melbourne as protests unfold across the country. Pro Palestinian camps have now been set up in universities in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra, Adelaide and Perth, inspired by the movement in the US.”

ANNA:

They've been ongoing since about April, asking for their universities to disclose and divest from relationships with Israeli universities.

Audio Excerpt - University Protester:

“Young people are tired of being placated and told to sit by while our government supports horrors unfolding in Palestine.”

ANNA:

But also, I think probably most interestingly, to divest from research partnerships with weapons manufacturers.

Audio Excerpt - University Protester 2:

“Tens of millions of dollars of partnerships with weapons manufacturers including but not limited to Lockheed Martin, Boeing and BAE Systems.”

ANNA:

They were arguing that these relationships with these weapons manufacturers, I mean and these are the big primes, as their known, on these big weapons companies that were seeded in the Cold War era and have become, you know, the major weapons manufacturers. Wherever there's a war, wherever there's something going on, you know, you'll be sure to find their hardware in the process.

Audio Excerpt - University Protester 2:

“We demand that our university cut ties with the weapons companies ”

ANNA:

They're saying this is a degree of complicity that we need to take responsibility for.

Audio Excerpt - News Presenter 3:

“Good evening. Well, breaking news now, pro-Palestinian protesters have taken over a building at the University of Melbourne. They are vowing they will not move.”

ANNA:

A few weeks ago in Melbourne the protest group there really upped the ante when they went from the lawn, where they had a whole bunch of tents set up, then they actually moved into the Arts West Building and occupied it.

Audio Excerpt - News Presenter 4:

"University staff are warning the group, leave now or face arrest. Victoria Police have told us they're monitoring the situation.”

ANNA:

It was quite a definitive move on their part. That's when they really forced the administrators to the table to negotiate what their demands were. And the University of Melbourne agreed to disclose their relationships with weapons manufacturers and be more transparent about these relationships and what transpires within them.

ASHLYNNE:

So Anna, tell me a little more about how Australian universities are working with weapons companies. What do we know about these relationships and how strong the links are?

ANNA:

Yeah, so I think it's really interesting and I think a lot of people didn't know about it until these recent protests.

The Coalition government under Malcolm Turnbull, they announced 200 billion for defence over the following decade.

Audio Excerpt - News Presenter 4:

“A decade long military build ups about to pump defence suppliers with more than $200 billion in orders.”

Audio Excerpt - Malcolm Turnbull:

“This is a big game changing step.”

ANNA:

Malcolm Turnbull basically announced that Australia has now has an ambition to get into the top ten weapons exporters.

Audio Excerpt - Christopher Pyne:

“Today, the Prime Minister, Marise Payne, and I launched the Defence Export Strategy for Australia. It's the first time any government has made such a dramatic commitment to growing our defence exports and ensuring that we overcome the peaks and troughs that have been the devil of the defence industry over many decades in Australia.”

ANNA:

So eight years ago, University of Melbourne announced a co-joint research centre with Lockheed Martin, which is the largest weapons exporter in the world.

Audio Excerpt - Research Centre Representative:

“The establishment of the lab here is advanced R&D by Australians before the globe. We’re doing this for the planet. That’s really important to me.”

ANNA:

And it was announced quite enthusiastically as the first time Lockheed Martin has opened a research centre outside of the United States. Less than two years later, there was another press release which announced an agreement between BAE Systems to have future collaborations between the university and that massive company.

Audio Excerpt - BAE Systems Representative:

“Are you hunting for a career and life post-uni that’s solid, flexible and gives you a real sense of purpose? Hi I’m Cassie from BAE Systems, Australia’s largest defence and security company.”

ANNA:

University of Sydney formalised a relationship with Thales, a french giant known for its guarded weapons.
So the list just keeps going on, and on, and on. And in a way it's an extension of the commercialisation of the higher education sector, which has created tensions for a long time now between, you know, what are the values of the academic research and what are the values of the private sector, which are really the clash.

Academic freedom has a clear stipulation that research needs to be transparent, and findings are published basically so they can be replicated. Whereas the private sector is founded on intellectual property, commercial and confidence. You know, those two sectors have always clashed and now you've got this extra layer that's the military industry research sector, which is bound up in, you know, national security measures. Hence why there's this push and pull over transparency.

ASHLYNNE:

And so then, after these kinds of negotiations between students and the universities. You know, the University of Melbourne, take that as an example – the uni has agreed to more transparency. Is that a big deal?

ANNA:

The Free Palestine movement saw it as a big deal. They saw it as a victory and they packed up their encampment and left the campus.

They released a statement saying that they would commit to additional disclosure of research grant arrangements.

But they added, you know, a disclaimer saying disclosure is subject to confidentiality obligations, national security regulations and law and the safety and security of our researchers.

It’s yet to be seen as to how much Melbourne University is actually going to disclose. You know, I mean, a lot can be hidden underneath disclaimers like that.

ASHLYNNE:

After the break, how the AUKUS deal could ‘turbocharge’ these partnerships.

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ASHLYNNE:

So Anna, these relationships between the weapons industry and universities are pretty controversial, but just flip that for a moment and talk to me about why a country like Australia would want top researchers at universities involved in this?

ANNA:

Having this really tight integration between the military and industry and academia, universities have a real tightrope to walk here in terms of what it is that universities do.

We've got the government creating $128 million fund for 4000 places at 16 universities which are connected to the AUKUS submarine program

So Hugh White, The Emeritus Professor at ANU, he's basically probably one of the most foremost critics of AUKUS. And he says that if you know these previous defence strategies, if they've permeated university life, then he says that AUKUS is going to turbocharge it.

So Hugh White says that two things are happening simultaneously. The university sector, and other elements of our research sector are being drawn more and more into forms of military related research and AUKUS is a huge part of that. But it's also because of the way the strategic environment is evolving. Basically, what we're now in is in this new Cold War. Australia has positioned itself strongly in supporting the United States in maintaining dominance in East Asia and the West Pacific.

There's a lot that's been said about AUKUS and the submarine program which is, you know, gone through a decade of mismanagement. I mean, that's a whole other story in itself, but if AUKUS is to succeed, we basically don't have an industry or a skill set to make it succeed. If AUKUS is going to be successful, the integration of military, industry, government and academia to create this entirely new sector.

Hugh White points to comments from the South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas, who told attendees at a News Corp Defending Australia Summit, that if AUKUS was going to succeed it needed to fundamentally transform every aspect of national policy from immigration to education. As far as Hugh White’s concerned, he's right. This is going to touch every part of our life, not just universities. And in universities, basically the relationship to the military world is going to become deeper and more extensive on one hand, and more exclusive on the other. So it's going to be a bigger part of the way they operate, a bigger source of money, and it's also, controversially, going to be a bigger constraint on what they do.

ASHLYNNE:

And so, what’s the government’s role in deepening these relationships Anna?

ANNA:

So, In March this year, Parliament passed the Defence Trade Controls Amendment Act, which really alarmed the academic and scientific community. Basically because it creates this export licence-free environment between the AUKUS partners, which removes barriers to defence trade, research, collaboration and co-development.

Audio Excerpt - Politician:

“Now the overriding purpose of this bill is, as the bill states, to strengthen Australia's national security and protect sensitive defence goods and technology by enhancing Australia's defence force…”

ANNA:

So you have, across the university sector, research with individual foreigners and other nations have now become fraught. There are jail terms, you know, that are on the table now if researchers share expertise and knowledge in a way which might threaten that arrangement.

Audio Excerpt - Politician:

“My view, and that of the committee, is that the bill will support and strengthen the objectives of AUKUS partnership with the United States and the United Kingdom, allowing for greater opportunities for both industry and individuals engaging in regulated defence articles and services, as well as building a much more robust industrial base.”

ANNA:

And last year the president of the Australian Academy of Science, Chennupati Jagadish, expressed real serious reservations about the legislation's impact on scientific research in Australia, especially where more than a third of the postgraduate research students are from overseas.

So basically, many universities are sort of at their idealistic heart a global enterprise, where researchers and academics create bonds with other nations and it's kind of like a soft diplomacy. So when you have this sort of military complex drawing in academia along with industry, I mean, basically what a lot of people are talking about is how it's binding us to certain countries and not to others. And there’s a real worry about what that might do in all sorts of sectors throughout Australian society.

ASHLYNNE:

Anna, it’s fairly logical that weapons companies would want to be making the most of cutting edge academic research, but are they involved in other parts of our education system too?

ANNA:

So, I mean, I've had these conversations with multiple people. Like I spoke to Isaac Beauville, who is a member of Teachers and Students for Palestine, and he talks about it as being a real whitewashing campaign to have weapons companies in universities and to try and normalise the business that they do.

And Isaac Beauville obviously agrees, he says if you're making money off making weapons, you shouldn't be involved in delivering educational material.

But what has also been revealed, is that they’re also in primary schools and high schools. These are companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, BAE, Raytheon, basically providing STEM curriculum.

Applications such as Science Alive, First Lego League. It's pretty fascinating to see photos of children with their Code Quest certificates standing in front of a Lockheed Martin banner.

What these weapons companies say is that they're all about self-defence and every country has a right to self-defence. It's a matter of, at what point does self-defence become warmongering? At what point does self-defence become profit driven? And these are really deep, complicated issues that we really need robust Democratic conversation around. You know, that it's taken a protest movement that has, you know, been the butt of quite a lot of criticism to publicise these relationships, to be honest that's not good enough. We should already have had a really large degree of transparency around them.

ASHLYNNE:

Anna, thanks so much for your time today.

ANNA:

That’s alright, thank you for having me.

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ASHLYNNE:

Also in the news today,

Asked whether Julian Assange will ever publish confidential documents again at a press conference yesterday, his wife Stella refused to give a definitive answer, saying that for now Assange wants to taste real food and enjoy his freedom but added she believed he would always defend human rights.

Stella Assange held the press conference yesterday, alongside MPs from the cross bench and longtime supporters of Assange’s cause.

Before we go today, a special note. For the past two and a bit years, Scott Mitchell has been our editor here at 7am but today is his final show. He says, “thanks for listening, love you all.”

But we have something to say too. Scott’s smart, he’s creative, he’s full of energy and he’s also just a really good human. We’ve been so lucky to work with him. So, from the entire team here, goodbye.

7AM TEAM MEMBERS:

“Goodbye Scott,"
“Bye Chief,"
“See you Scott,”
“Bye Scott,”
“Bye Steve, I mean Scott,”
“Brother Mitchell, goodbye.”

ASHLYNNE:

And thank you. It’s also my last show hosting 7am and the biggest thanks to all of you for listening every weekday for the past few months. A special thanks to Erik Jensen and editor Scott Mitchell for helping me keep this seat warm.”

Next week your host will be a familiar voice, Rick Morton, before Ruby Jones returns in a couple of weeks.

7am is a daily show from Schwartz Media and The Saturday Paper.

It’s produced by Kara Jensen-Mackinnon, Cheyne Anderson and Zoltan Fesco.

Our senior producer is Chris Dengate. Our technical producer is Atticus Bastow.

Our editor, for the last time, is Scott Mitchell. Sarah McVeigh is our head of audio. Erik Jensen is our editor-in-chief.

Mixing by Travis Evans and Atticus Bastow.

Our theme music is by Ned Beckley and Josh Hogan of Envelope Audio.

This is 7am. I'm Ashlynne McGhee. Thanks for listening.

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