May 12, 2024
A Chinese researcher accused of involvement in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is the fifth visa applicant known to have been black-listed by the Australian government over WMD connections, court and tribunal records show.
Xiaolong Zhu has been fighting his rejection for a student visa and likely deportation for four years, while pushing on with potentially sensitive drone research at the Queensland University of Technology.
The Weekend Australian revealed how the 35-year-old Chinese national had been found in a 2020 determination by the foreign minister to be a person whose presence in this country "may be directly or indirectly associated with the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction".
The Department of Home Affairs, QUT and the CSIRO division that awarded Mr Zhu PhD scholarships worth $75,000 have failed to answer detailed questions from this masthead about the baffling case.
Opposition home affairs and cyber security spokesman James Paterson, who chaired the powerful parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security under the previous Morrison government, rejected an assertion by QUT that Mr Zhu's research in Australia had no military application.
Senator Paterson said the young man's work on navigation technology to fly drones into spaces lacking GPS coverage was a classic example of dual-use research readily transferable to war fighting. This was increasingly being targeted by foreign intelligence services, he warned.
"It should not require any imagination at all to understand why operating a drone in a GPSdenied environment would have military applications," Senator Paterson said on Sunday.
"This is the classic case of drones in military conflict where you hope to be able to continue to use them for surveillance, for target identification and for reconnaissance when a GPS network has been taken out, as is highly likely in any major conflict." The WMD finding against Mr Zhu is covered by nondisclosure certificates issued by Home Affairs, and it is not clear whether the other parties including Mr Zhu himself are aware of what he has been accused of.
A May 3 decision by Federal Circuit and Family Court judge Gregory Egan dismissing his latest appeal of the adverse visa decision noted that the certificated documents "shed no light" on why he had been banned, "merely that the determination had been made that he was such a person".
The other four known cases concerning alleged WMD association also involved highly qualified foreign postgraduate students who were deemed to have failed the public interest criterion of the Migration Regulations.
In pursuing them, the government has gone to strenuous lengths to keep secret the assessment processes used by Australian intelligence and security agencies to make WMD findings reaching back more than a decade.
In a 2013 Federal Court case, an Iranian researcher identified as plaintiff B60 challenged the rejection of her student visa application as a person who could be associated with the proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
Like Mr Zhu, the woman professed to be "amazed and shocked" to have been subject to such a finding after she was awarded a government scholarship to join a doctoral research program at the University of Queensland on hydrogen-based clean energy. The judge found she was "not, at any time advised of facts which were adverse" to her visa application.
The then deputy secretary for intelligence and security in the Defence Department, Stephen Meekin, gave evidence that a "discrete class" of classified documents had been "created for the specific purpose of informing the Australian government of a visa applicant's links to the proliferation of WMD".
If these were disclosed, it would "likely prejudice Australia's . security and defence interests by revealing in a high level of detail information from many disparate sources how Australia's defence intelligence agencies and organisations integrate and analyse that intelligence information, and the scope and limits of the Australian government's awareness of WMD programs and threats." While Justice John Dowsett identified a risk that "like any specialised group, the intelligence community may become, or have become preoccupied with itself, its own values and perceived importance", he accepted that disclosure of the classified files would be a threat to the public interest.
"In the circumstances I concluded that the WMD assessments are documents of a class which ought, for that reason alone, to be treated as immune from disclosure," the judge ruled.
In the case of Chinese national Huimin Yu, 29, whose application for a student visa to enter a PhD course at the University of South Australia was refused in 2020, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal also found it could not "of itself, go behind the decision" on her possible WMD links, and that she had accepted this.
But the AAT upheld, on procedural grounds, that part of the adverse determination had not been properly made out and sent her file back to Home Affairs for reconsideration. The outcome is not known.
Through his lawyers, Mr Zhu told Judge Egan and, earlier, the AAT, that he didn't know he had been linked to WMD proliferation by the government.
Defending him in a 2020 letter to the Department of Home Affairs, then QUT pro-vice-chancellor Helen Klaebe wrote: "I would like to confirm that the specific research topic of Ziaolong (sic) Zhu's PhD thesis is not directly or indirectly associated with a proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The topic of his research . concentrates on decision-making theory and aims to develop an efficient system that uses three or four UAVs also commonly known as drones for civilian application scenarios . in an indoor clutter environment during search-and-rescue missions." However, the finding against him will intensify concern about research security at Australian universities, with Senator Paterson saying the espionage risks should be clearly understood following the establishment five years ago of the governmentbacked University Foreign Interference Taskforce and disturbing revelations from a 2021-22 inquiry by the joint parliamentary security and intelligence committee he chaired. This heard evidence of researchers and their families being threatened by foreign intelligence operatives wanting access to their sensitive work.
Drone technology is considered a prime target and the QUT Centre for Robotics, to which Mr Zhu is attached, boasts world-class scientists and labs.
"It's several years on from the intelligence committee inquiry and there's really no excuse today for permitting high-risk research in the dual-use area to occur on university campuses, particularly with students who come from authoritarian countries and especially China, given that it's been publicly assessed to be the number one source of state-backed intellectual property theft and we know it has coercive and intimidatory intentions towards the region," Senator Paterson told The Australian. "The naivety of facilitating dual-use research for an authoritarian state is just unforgivable in this day and age." Academic Brendan WalkerMunro of Southern Cross University, who has published on the vulnerability of Australian research programs to spying, said the UFIT guidelines needed strengthening.
"Even the legal narrative that Zhu is 'directly or indirectly associated with the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction' doesn't explain the case properly," Dr Walker-Munro posted at the weekend.
"The real issue is Zhu's research . could be just as easily used in missiles or autonomous weapons as it could be for searchand-rescue operations.
"That said, there is absolutely nothing to suggest that Zhu has done the wrong thing or committed any crime here. But this is the archetypal dual-use case study in university research.
"We don't have a research security policy in this country and the UFIT guidelines which no doubt QUT will have followed to the letter aren't doing the job." The Brisbane university declined to comment when approached on Sunday. CSIRO Data61 said it was unable to discuss individual student or scholarship arrangements, but worked closely with security and policy agencies to manage the risk of foreign interference.
