I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it: it’s long past time to bulldoze the universities.
It’s gone beyond them failing at their core purpose of teaching and imbuing future generations with critical thinking abilities. It’s gone well beyond them failing at their self-declared purpose: serving ‘the public good’, because it’s beyond obvious that they no longer do either. It’s not even that they’ve become nothing but rapaciously greedy moneymaking machines.
It’s that they’re actively betraying the nation in their unprincipled grabbing for cash.
Case in point, this jaw-dropping revelation:
An urgent review has been launched into an Australian university’s partnership with China to train its next generation of cyber warriors.
If this is allowed to go ahead, it will be the most egregious act of national sabotage since the Howard government handed the Port of Darwin to China – a decision the Albanese refused to reverse. What this deal amounts to is training the soldiers of our single biggest threat in how to undermine our cyber-infrastructure.
Macquarie University has struck a 13-year deal approved by Beijing to build a joint campus inside China’s military-linked tech system – a school feeding recruits to the People’s Liberation Army.
Are these people completely insane? This is tantamount to teaching Imperial Japan how to sabotage Owen guns and Bristol Beaufighters in the lead-up to WWII. Unsurprisingly, the intelligence is ropeable.
“All this sounds like alarm bells,” said a former top Australian intelligence executive.
“I’d be amazed if ASIO (Australian Security Intelligence Organisation) doesn’t speak to Macquarie about this.”
And the Albanese government is yet again asleep at the wheel.
When alerted to the partnership by the Herald-Sun, Foreign Minister Penny Wong on Wednesday ordered an “expedited” review.
How did the government not know this already? Who am I kidding: this is the same government that was absolutely clueless that an entire Chinese fleet was conducting live-fire drills in the Tasman sea, until a commercial airline pilot happened to notice. Is the government taking the least notice of what the venal university sector is up to?
Over two years, vice-chancellor Bruce Dowton and deputy vice-chancellor Rorden Wilkinson have flown to China, forming the Nanjing Normal University (NNU) – Macquarie University Joint Institute.
Seventy per cent of its computer science curriculum comes from Sydney. One-third of the faculty is Australian. Every class is taught in China. Every degree carries Macquarie’s name.
Its partner, NNU’s School of Computer and Electronic Information and School of Artificial Intelligence, trains Party officials and cyber students – also feeding recruits to US-black-listed defence giants Hikvision and CETC’s 55th Research Institute.
It’s not as if China’s even hiding what they’re up to. The ‘Thousand Talents’ programme is open that China is plundering whatever Western universities are stupid enough to let them get their hands on. China is estimated to steal an astonishing half a trillion dollars worth of intellectual property every year.
And Australian universities are willingly bending over and inviting them to take what they want.
“It’s not a stretch to believe [Macquarie’s] students will one day work for the PLA,” the former senior intelligence official said […]
The former intelligence executive said the credentials could let Party-trained technologists slip into Western security agencies or firms.
“It would take nothing for Macquarie graduates to end up applying for national security graduate programs. They’ll become malicious insider risks.”
Undergraduates must pass an “ideological and political character” test. Postgraduates must “support the leadership of the Communist Party”.
Not half as devotedly as Australia’s university sector does, we can bet.
So, what is the government doing about it?
A spokesperson for Minister Wong said “under the powers (Foreign Arrangements Scheme), the Minister for Foreign Affairs can terminate an agreement if it is inconsistent with Australia’s foreign policy”.
Will she, though? Don’t hold your breath.
