Via The Australian:
Australia’s spy agency has warned universities about the risk to national security from Chinese government recruitment programs, including the Thousand Talents Plan, and has alerted them as recently as May to the potential for collaboration to turn into espionage.
ASIO gave private briefings to universities urging them to strengthen their disclosure regimes and making them aware of the risks of foreign talent recruitment programs including technology transfer, security sources said.
The revelations come as the deputy chairman of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, Labor MP Anthony Byrne, supported a demand by his Liberal colleague and committee chairman Andrew Hastie for an “urgent” inquiry into the Thousand Talents Plan.
This on the back of:
Universities will face a sweeping review into whether they are meeting national standards for freedom of speech in the face of several censorship controversies engulfing higher education.
Former Deakin University vice-chancellor Sally Walker will be tasked with investigating whether universities are in alignment with the free speech code devised by former High Court chief justice Robert French.
The review will assess whether there are gaps in their responses to freedom-of-speech issues, and if more action is required to make sure university leaders protect academic freedoms.
Not good enough. We need a royal commission into university China links. The entire sector has sold out to CCP influences:
- Confucious Institutes have got to go;
- research collaborations with CCP operatives have got to go;
- corrupt giveaways to CCP operatives have to go;
- free speech must be returned;
- the number of foreign students must be cut;
- pedagogical standards must be restored;
- cheating must be stamped out;
- public funding must be available again if necessary.
The tertiary sector is now a calamitous market failure that has torn up its social license to operate and is directly threatening our democracy.
Rip it off the CCP tit.
