Some in Australia trying to shoo its golden goose away

Australia, under the Anthony Albanese government, is proving to be a textbook case of what happens to countries when anxiety masquerades as strategy. The latest symptom is Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong's intervention to pressure the Australian National University and the University of Queensland to sever academic ties with Shandong University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences respectively.

Given the Pentagon's recent campaign to pressure universities in the United States to cut research collaborations with China, it is highly questionable whether Canberra's latest action is entirely its own — or whether it reflects pressure from Washington.

This is reminiscent of a scene in the Australian satirical sitcom Utopia, in which officials are discussing spending billions to protect Australia's trade routes, only to acknowledge that the country's biggest trading partner is China. "So we're spending close to $30 billion a year to protect our trade with China ... from China?" asks a bewildered character.

The problem is that Canberra seems increasingly determined to turn this joke into policy. Wong, once regarded as a pragmatist, is now helping dismantle Australia's academic links with China — amid a political climate in which "national security" has become a blank check for bureaucratic vandalism. Is Australia protecting its economic interests by frightening its golden goose away?

Chinese students are a financial pillar of the university sector in Australia. Statistics show that Chinese enrollments reached 192,225 in 2025, accounting for 23 percent of Australia's international students, generating A$12.7 billion ($8.98 billion) in economic activity. Across New South Wales, without Chinese enrollments, the sector's A$583 million surplus would be a A$1.754 billion deficit.

Between January and April 2026, Chinese applications for degree-level student visas fell 32 percent from the average for the same period in 2023-25. Higher-education applications plunged 39 percent, reaching their lowest level in nearly 12 years, according to media reports. Canberra's response? Further alienate Chinese students and researchers by dismantling institutional ties. The message is difficult to misunderstand: Chinese people are welcome as revenue streams, but increasingly suspect as intellectual partners.

The academic squeeze is part of a wider pattern. Take the Port of Darwin. In 2015, the Northern Territory government granted China's Landbridge Group a 99-year lease for A$506 million. The port was loss-making; Landbridge invested heavily and expanded capacity from 16 million to 30 million tonnes. Security reviews found no national-security threat, and a 2023 review saw no need to cancel or alter the lease. Yet in January 2026, citing "national security", the Albanese government announced that Canberra would terminate Landbridge's operating rights.

Washington's subsequent allocation of $1.2 billion to upgrade military facilities at the port only makes the politics more conspicuous. Landbridge has since initiated arbitration at the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes.

Meanwhile, Australia is deepening military cooperation with Japan and the Philippines, including hosting Japanese hypersonic-missile tests on Australian ranges and its participation in the Philippines' largest Balikatan military exercises with the US in decades.

It is crystal clear that Canberra is moving closer to a US-led containment strategy while assuming its economic relationship with China will somehow remain insulated. That assumption is rather Utopia-like.

After years of damage by the pro-US Scott Morrison government, China-Australia relations had finally begun to recover thanks to joint efforts of the two sides. Bilateral trade reached A$309 billion in 2025, Chinese tourists returned in force and high-level dialogue resumed. Now Canberra risks squandering that hard-won capital.

Australia's economic interests with China are not something that can be wished away with strategic rhetoric. Iron ore, liquefied natural gas, beef, universities and tourist operators cannot simply be redirected because Washington is pressuring Canberra to choose sides. Nor can US military cooperation compensate for the economic value of a stable relationship with Australia's largest trading partner.

Australia lectures China about a "rules-based order" while repudiating a legally binding 99-year lease. It invokes academic freedom while pressuring universities to sever legitimate partnerships. It worries about foreign influence while deepening dependence on a US security architecture whose strategic priorities are not always in Australia's interests.

A serious national-security policy distinguishes between evidence and suspicion, between espionage and scholarship, between strategic prudence and political theater. Canberra would do well to remember that stable China-Australia relations are not a concession to Beijing. They are an expression of Australian self-interest. The choice is between strategic autonomy and strategic reflex.