The Militarised University: Where Secrecy Goes to Thrive

Across Australia’s universities, the AUKUS military initiative between the US, UK and Australia, primarily focused on developing nuclear powered technology for a new submarine design, has titillated the managerial wonks of the tertiary education sector. In September, the Defence Department announced that 4,000 additional Commonwealth supported places (CSPs) for undergraduate students would be funded as part of its “Nuclear-Powered Submarine Student Pathways” strategy.

Then come the true villains of the peace, the arms manufacturers and companies that make the military-university-industrial complex intimate and obscene.

November 14, 2023, by: Dr Binoy Kampmark,  https://theaimn.com/the-militarised-university-where-secrecy-goes-to-thrive/

For anyone wishing to bury secrets, especially of the unsavoury sort, there is one forum that stands out. Call it a higher education institution. Call it a university. Even better, capitalise it: the University. This is certainly the case in Australia, where education is less a pursuit of knowledge as the acquiring of a commodity, laid out spam for so much return. On that vast island continent, the university, dominated by a largely semi-literate and utterly unaccountable management, is a place where secrets are buried, concealed with a gleeful dedication verging on mania.

In its submission to what will hopefully become the Australian Universities Accord, the Australian Association of University Professors (AAUP) notes the following: “Unfortunately, university managements are increasingly disconnected from and unaccountable to academic values and academic communities. Students, Government and granting bodies, pay universities to deliver services according to academic values, but academics are impeded from working in accordance with academic values by interfering management. Further, the managers themselves do not work in accordance with academic values.”

Those in the defence industry have taken note. By turning such institutions of instruction into supply lines for research and development in armaments, they can be assured of secrecy conditions the envy of most intelligence agencies. Consulting, viewing, gaining access to relevant agreements, documentation and projects for reasons of public discussion is virtually impossible. These are always seen as “commercial” and “in confidence”.

Only the overly fed and watered members of the University Politburo are granted such access. Entry into the arcana of its deliberations is ceremonially tolerated via Academic Board meetings or Senatorial deliberations. Furthermore, academics throughout the university sport a reliable, moral flabbiness that will prevent them from spilling the beans and airing a troubled conscience, even in cases where leaking the documentation might be possible. Middle class, mortgage-laden status anxiety is the usual formula here, one that neuters revolutionary spirits – not that there was much to begin with.

Across Australia’s universities, the AUKUS military initiative between the US, UK and Australia, primarily focused on developing nuclear powered technology for a new submarine design, has titillated the managerial wonks of the tertiary education sector. In September, the Defence Department announced that 4,000 additional Commonwealth supported places (CSPs) for undergraduate students would be funded as part of its “Nuclear-Powered Submarine Student Pathways” strategy.

Institutes have sprung up running short courses to rake in the cash, such as the UWA Defence and Security Institute, which proudly claims to have created the “essential course for those seeking to gain a greater understanding of AUKUS Pillar 1 (nuclear powered submarines) and the impacts for Western Australia and beyond.” A course running for thirteen hours does not seem particularly hefty, but this is a field of glitz over substance.

Then come the true villains of the peace, the arms manufacturers and companies that make the military-university-industrial complex intimate and obscene. One of interest here is Israel’s Elbit Systems. For years, it has hammered out a reputation for manufacturing such lethal products as the Hermes 900 drone, which was first deployed in 2014 against targets in the Gaza Strip. It supplies the lion’s share of drones used by the Israeli Defence Forces for strikes and surveillance (the figure may be as high as 85%).

The company has managed to beef up many an activist’s resumé. Members of the Palestine Action group claim to have scored a victory in securing the permanent closure of two of Elbit’s sites in 2022, including the London head office. “The cracks in Elbit’s warehouse windows,” the organisation trumpeted in August this year, “do not simply represent cosmetic damage but also symbolise the crumbling foundations of Elbit’s relationship with the British State’s so-called defence interests.”

The corporation has also fallen out of favour with a number of investors. HSBC and the French multinational AXA Investment Managers divested from the company in 2018 and 2019 given its role in producing and commercialising cluster munitions and white phosphoros shells. In May 2022, the Australian sovereign wealth fund, Future Fund, excluded Elbit Systems Limited from its investment portfolio for much the same reasons.

Despite this blotched and blotted record, Elbit could still stealthily establish a bridgehead in the university sector down under through its creation, in 2021, of a Centre of Excellence in Human-Machine Teaming and Artificial Intelligence in Port Melbourne. Elbit Systems of Australia (ELSA) had two special clients: the state government of Victoria, which provided some funding via Invest Victoria, and RMIT University’s Centre for Industrial AI Research and Innovation. The two-year partnership with ELSA’s Centre of Excellence was intended to, according to ELSA’s then managing director and retired Major General Paul McLachlan, “research how to use drones to count the number of people in designated evacuation zones, then to co-ordinate and communicate the most efficient evacuation routes to everyone in the zone, as well as monitoring the area to ensure that everyone has been accounted for.”

Despite such seemingly noble goals, the opening ceremony in February 2021 had a distinctly heavy military accent, with senior representatives from the Royal Australian Airforce, DST (Defence Science and Technology) Group and the Capability Acquisition and Sustainment Group (CASG). No one present could deny that technology used in the context of civilian evacuations in the face of natural disaster could just as well be deployed in a military security context. As Antony Loewenstein has observed, “If you partner, as a state or a university, with a company like Elbit, you have blood on your hands because the record of Elbit in Israel-Palestine, on the US-Mexican border and elsewhere is so damned clear.”

Since the Hamas attacks on Israeli soil that took place on October 7, the ELSA-RMIT-Victorian relationship has seemingly altered. A war of horrendous carnage is being waged in the Gaza Strip. Activists claim to have scored a famous victory in securing the university’s hazy termination of any partnership with ELSA. “This is a significant victory for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement in Australia,” claims Hilmi Dabbagh of BDS Australia. “Australian universities have been put on notice that they will be targeted if they partner with any Israeli company or institution complicit in human rights abuses and attacks on Palestinians.”

Such confidence is admirably fresh, if a touch green. It is worth looking at the university statement, which is revealing in ways that have been entirely missed in the enthusiastic pronouncements of the BDS movement. The university claims to “not design, develop or manufacture weapons or munitions in the university or as part of any partnership. With regard to Elbit Systems, RMIT does not have a partnership with Elbit Systems or any of their subsidiaries, including Elbit Systems of Australia (ELSA).” Such wording avoids the language of termination, leaving the question open as to whether it ever had an arrangement to begin with, with its requisite project links. This will, as with much else, be deemed commercial, in confidence, and buried in the bowels of secrecy we have come to expect from the antipodean university sector.

November 14, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, Education | Leave a comment

Nuclear subs challenge trains 10 year old children for war

By Sue WarehamSep 11, 2023  https://johnmenadue.com/nuclear-subs-challenge-trains-10-year-old-children-for-war/

It’s time for education ministers across the country to show leadership and protect our children from vested interests and pro-war propaganda.

On 19 June, the Defence Department launched its Nuclear-Powered Submarine Propulsion Challenge, for years 7 – 12 students across the nation. The program seeks to engage the enthusiasm of young people for the complex and hugely controversial nuclear submarine program, in the hope that some of the students will want to contribute to this form of war-fighting when they leave school.

The nuclear submarine proposal has implications that go far beyond the understanding of the students targeted for this program (which include those as young as 11 years). They include the nuclear weapons proliferation potential, the consequences of a war – possibly nuclear war – with China, for which the submarines are planned, the problem of high-level, long-lived nuclear waste for which there is no solution anywhere, and the matter of what else will suffer financially as we attempt the gargantuan task of paying for this program. In the absence of any awareness or understanding of this context, the schools program is little more than propaganda.

The program fits with the growing prevalence of private weapons company-sponsored STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) programs in schools. Their purpose is to create positive brand name associations, such as happy memories, from which can flow varying degrees of attachment to the corporate brand. Company logos are displayed on all materials, and there is often direct contact between students, teachers and company representatives. An underfunded public education system is perfect for the companies’ purposes, because overstretched teachers will welcome material that might make their job a little easier.

There is ample evidence that children are very susceptible to the creation of positive associations with an advertised product. Even into adolescence, children don’t necessarily have the skills to critically assess the intentions behind persuasive marketing tactics, or understand what a brand or product really represents.

The militarisation of STEM education is not confined to our schools (and universities, which comprise a huge network in themselves of weapons company partnerships). The National Youth Science Forum has as its primary sponsor Lockheed Martin, the world’s biggest weapons maker. The Questacon National Science and Technology Centre in Canberra receives major funding for its Engineering is Elementary program from the Defence Department, with ADF engineers being actively involved in delivering the program.

The industry’s need is for a workforce socialised to accept warfare as inevitable and the industry itself as always a force for good. The “Minors and Missiles” report of the Medical Association for Prevention of War outlines the problem, its extent in Australia and how it can be addressed. The new organisation Teachers for Peace works to this end also.

In relation to the nuclear submarine challenge for schools, on 1 July the Adelaide Advertiser published an article “Kids, 10, training for to build a workforce for AUKUS, SA’s $368bn nuclear submarine project”, about the Beacon program in some schools, run in conjunction with weapons giant BAE Systems. Among other activities, it allows students to virtually load and fire weaponry, one student stating “It’s a lot more fun, it’s like playing a video game but it’s a lot more educational”. Such presentation of warfare and its associated hardware to children as a game – which extends also to our war commemoration – is an abuse of their right to aspire to live in a peaceful society.

An additional concern with the Nuclear-Powered Submarine Propulsion Challenge is that it anti-democratically circumvents strong community opposition to a technology – nuclear power – which has been consistently rejected by the Australian people. Barely a person in the country, including in our parliament, was even asked about the nuclear submarines, and yet the opposition to the proposal is strong, with much highly critical commentary. To ignore all that and go straight to the next generation with exciting prizes is reprehensible.

On 31 August, the Federal Executive of the Australian Education Union (AEU) passed a strong resolution reaffirming the AEU’s deep commitment to peace and its opposition to militarism. In relation to the nuclear submarine challenge, the resolution stated that the AEU “condemns this program, and the use of Australian schools by the Defence Department, in drawing secondary students into the government’s development of new industries focused on armament manufacture and industries associated with warfare.”

It continued “A politicised pro-AUKUS curriculum has no place in our schools, alongside other private industries who attempt to use schools as a vehicle for promotion of their own products and profits hidden behind spurious educational benefits for students.”

The AEU is to be applauded. It’s time for education ministers across the country to show the same leadership in protecting our children from vested interests and pro-war propaganda.

September 12, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, Education | Leave a comment

Teachers in boycott of nuclear submarine project

The Australian: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/teachers-to-ban-indoctrination-on-nuclear-submarines/news-story/d7d7c434d3f4ec2982fb52063eecf1a3?amp

The Australian Education Union will meet to discuss boycotting a science experiment that would see students design nuclear-powered submarines.

By natasha bita. August 29, 2023 The Australian: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/teachers-to-ban-indoctrination-on-nuclear-submarines/news-story/d7d7c434d3f4ec2982fb52063eecf1a3?amp

Pacifist teachers are boycotting a Defence Department “brainwashing’’ program that asks children to design nuclear-powered submarines.

The Australian Education Union federal executive will meet this week to consider a national boycott of the science project, which requires high school students to design a nuclear-powered propulsion system for a submarine.

The union is furious that the Albanese government is spending $368bn on AUKUS nuclear-powered submarines at a time when most public schools are receiving less money than they were supposed to under the Gonski needs-based funding deal.

At a grassroots level, some teachers are boycotting the Nuclear-Powered Propulsion Challenge, which was launched by Deputy Chief of Navy Rear Admiral Jonathon Earley in June as a science, technology, engineering and maths competition.

The controversial STEM challenge asks students to work in teams to submit engineering plans for submarine nuclear propulsion.

Defence devised the program “to inspire students to discover how nuclear propulsion works and how it makes submarines more capable’’.

Winning students from each state and territory will visit HMAS Stirling in Western Australia, tour a Collins-class submarine, dine with submariners and use a training simulator to “drive” a submarine through Sydney Harbour.

AEU branch meetings in Victoria have resolved to block the project in schools, and environmental group Friends of the Earth is now pushing for a national boycott.

Friends of the Earth nuclear-free co-ordinator Sanne de Swart said the Defence Department had made a “blatant attempt to normalise nuclear power and indoctrinate children into building in­struments of death’’.

She said the STEM project was “indoctrinating” students and failed to address the health and environmental risks of nuclear power.

“It fails to acknowledge Australia’s significant and devastating history with nuclear, including the atomic bomb tests, uranium mining and the attempts to impose nuclear waste dumps,’’ she said.

Union members at Virtual School Victoria voted to condemn the program.

“We resolve to refuse to refer students to this program or others like it, and we will refuse to promote it within our schools,’’ the branch stated.

A union meeting of public school teachers in the regional Victorian town of Benalla also called on the state’s Education Department to “cease all involvement in this and similar programs’’.

“The government spending of $368bn on AUKUS nuclear submarines will require whole new industries in Australia, and beginn­ing to draw our brightest teenage students into a war industry is outrageous,’’ their motion states. “A politicised pro-AUKUS curriculum has no place in our schools.’’

Melbourne primary school teacher Emma Kefford is planning to vote for a boycott at a meeting of the AUE’s inner-city branch on Thursday. She said she was “pretty disturbed’’ that the Defence Department was providing curriculum material to schools.

“I think it contradicts some of the other values in the Australian curriculum,’’ she said. “These inventions seem pretty exciting to young people, but they’re often removed from the realities of war and the horrors it entails.’’

The Victorian Education Department promotes the challenge on its website, saying: “We’re encouraging schools to register teams of 3 to 5 students to work together on the project.’’

The South Australian government also promotes the program on its website, as a way to “get young Australian minds thinking like engineers and scientists, by completing activities based on nuclear submarine engineering’’.

A spokesman for federal Education Minister Jason Clare said he did not share the concerns. The Defence Department was asked how many schools were participating but did not respond.

August 29, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, Education | Leave a comment

TEACHERS ACT AGAINST SCHOOLS NUCLEAR SUBMARINES PROGRAM

the normalisation of militarisation and downplaying of nuclear risks in schools is a grave concern.

“Nuclear and military aspects in the curriculum fail to address health and environmental risks associated with both, as well as the drive to war,”

Education. 28 Aug 2023   https://www.nationaltribune.com.au/teachers-act-against-schools-nuclear-subs-program/

Children being taught to make weapons

Teachers are moving to boycott a new pro-nuclear-fuel brainwashing program being introduced into schools.

There’s growing momentum within unions to ban the Nuclear-powered Submarine Propulsion Challenge, which is a Defence Department initiative backed by the Federal and Victorian governments.

In a blatant attempt to normalise nuclear power and indoctrinate children into building instruments of death, the challenge asks students from years 7 to 12 to design a nuclear-powered propulsion system for a submarine.

Friends of the Earth (FoE) understands that motions calling for a boycott have already been passed in some chapters of the Australian Education Union.

One motion, passed at a recent branch meeting said: “We resolve to refuse to refer students to this program or others like it, and we will refuse to promote it within our schools. We call on the Department of Education to cease all involvement in this and similar programs.”

Another said: “We don’t intend to refer students to this program or others like it, or to promote it within our schools. We call on the Department of Education to cease all involvement in this and similar programs.”

Friends of the Earth is supporting the ban and has written to the Australian Education Union asking them to impose a nationwide boycott.

FoE Nuclear Free Coordinator Sanne De Swart said the normalisation of militarisation and downplaying of nuclear risks in schools is a grave concern.

“Nuclear and military aspects in the curriculum fail to address health and environmental risks associated with both, as well as the drive to war,” Sanne De Swart said.

“It fails to acknowledge Australia’s significant and devastating history with nuclear, including the atomic bomb tests, uranium mining and the attempts to impose nuclear waste dumps, all which have and continue to affect First Nations communities disproportionately .”

August 29, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, Education | Leave a comment

Nuclear indoctrination for Australian school-children – normalising nuclear submarines.

 I wonder if they will design a deep geological repository for high level waste too.

Defence takes nuclear propulsion challenge to schools, By APDR Staff, 21/06/2023

Defence has launched a Nuclear-Powered Submarine Propulsion Challenge in Australian high schools, providing a new generation of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) students the chance to win a trip to HMAS Stirling in Western Australia to see first-hand how submarines work. The introductory-level, nationwide program will provide teachers with learning resources to help students design their own engineering plans for submarine nuclear propulsion……..

Rear Admiral Jonathon Earley, Deputy Chief of Navy said: “The Nuclear-Powered Submarine Propulsion Challenge presents an opportunity for students across Australia to gain a greater appreciation of the STEM principles behind one of the most significant national projects ever undertaken in Australia, as we prepare to deliver nuclear-powered submarines for the Royal Australian Navy……

 These students and others like them will be our future submariners, engineers and technicians. The winners will experience a visit to HMAS Stirling in Western Australia, tour a Collins-class submarine, dine with submariners and virtually drive a submarine through Sydney Harbour in the submarine bridge training simulator.”  https://asiapacificdefencereporter.com/defence-takes-nuclear-propulsion-challenge-to-schools/

June 22, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, Education | Leave a comment

Universities and the AUKUS Military-Industrial Complex

Last year, the submission of Universities Australia to the Defence Strategic Review was almost begging to link universities with the defence needs of the country. All the Defence Department and Australian Defence Forces needed to do was ask.

How fortunate, then, that AUKUS came bumbling along.

April 12, 2023, by: Dr Binoy Kampmark,  https://theaimn.com/universities-and-the-aukus-military-industrial-complex/

Here they go. Vice-chancellors, university managers, and creatures with titles unmentionable and meaningless (deputies, semi-deputies, sub-deputies), a whole cavalcade of parasitic creatures in need of neutering, keen to pursue another daft idea. Australian universities do not want to miss out on the military-industrial-education complex, whatever its imperilling dangers. With the war inspired AUKUS security pact, which promises the stripping of the Australian budget to the tune of $AUD 368 billion over the course of three decades, a corrupt establishment promises to get worse.

The AUKUS distraction could not have come at a better time. The tertiary sector in Australia is becoming increasingly cadaverous, marked by cost-cutting, rampant casualisation and heavy teaching and workloads for those battling away in the pedagogical trenches.

In a recent piece by Guardian Australia’s higher education reporter, an academic, who preferred to remain anonymous fearing institutional retribution, likened the modern Australian university to a supermarket. Students were the customers filing through the self-checkout counters; the staff, increasingly rendered irrelevant, were readily disposable.

The stories have been familiar for years, even as the offending by university management continues unabated: tutors being paid insufficiently to read and grade work adequately; virtually non-existent job security; the suppression of academic freedom and criticism of ghastly management practices. Given the pathological secrecy under which universities work under, essential data shedding light on class sizes, staff-student ratios, and contracts with private business interests, is virtually impossible to attain.

But despite the Australian university sector proving unsustainable, unprincipled, and ungainly, individuals such as Catriona Jackson, the CEO of Universities Australia, are on the hunt for new frontiers.

Last year, the submission of Universities Australia to the Defence Strategic Review was almost begging to link universities with the defence needs of the country. All the Defence Department and Australian Defence Forces needed to do was ask.

As the Australian Financial Review reported at the time, “The universities need to be prepared to respond in an adaptable and efficient manner to a clear demand signal from defence in terms of workforce needs – both skills and numbers – as well as technology and hardware needs.”

How fortunate, then, that AUKUS came bumbling along. For Jackson, principles in education are less important than inflated commercial opportunities or, to use her lingo, commercialisation. Distant from the process of learning itself, unaware of the delivery of courses and the classroom, she sees this war making security pact as packed with promise. “It’s workforce, workforce, workforce,” she sloganeered to her Sky News host Kieran Gilbert. “It’s not just nuclear physicists we need, although we do need some of those and it’s a very specialist profession. Almost every area of human endeavour we need a capacity uplift, so engineers, doctors, nurses, psychologists, pretty much everyone.”

Evidently hearing the war jingles around the corner, Jackson is journeying to Washington for meetings with national security officials from the US State Department and National Science Foundation. It is her hope that the number of Australian university partnerships will be expanded, “with more than 10,000 formal partnerships already in place with fellow institutions around the world.” The message she takes to the US capital will, however, be focused on “developing the capability [of Australian universities] to deliver the project, including through the provision of skilled workers and world-class research and development.”

Certain publications have also exuded jingoistic cheer on the new role of Australia’s tertiary sector. The Australian, one of Rupert Murdoch’s premier rags of froth and bile, is ever reliable in this respect. The paper’s higher education editor, Tim Dodd, in a March contribution [paywalled], posed two questions to those in the university sector: Had Australian universities ever played such a vital role in national defence as they would be likely to do over the next two decades in building nuclear-powered submarines? Would they even want to be involved?

Throughout his piece, Dodd seems to think that a university system untethered to the defence establishment is a morally questionable thing. In doing so, he betrays his ignorance of those wise words from US Democratic Senator J. William Fulbright, who warned that “in lending itself too much to the purposes of government, a university fails its higher purposes.”

Dodd can merely observe that, “In the post-war period universities were still not critical to defence programs.” AUKUS and the nuclear submarine program had changed matters. “Australia is now embarking on an enormous program to build, operate and maintain nuclear-powered submarines and a clear goal is sovereign capability.” All in all, it was “a critical national priority that universities are right to give their full support to. Their backing is critical.”

Leaving aside such platitudinous nonsense as “sovereign capability” – the technology, expertise, control and guidance over this new promised machinery will always be directed from Washington – the sentiments are clear. The military-industrial-university complex is a matter to be celebrated. There are, for instance, “other parts of AUKUS” that will involve “our top universities” in such areas as “advanced research cyber security, artificial intelligence and quantum technologies.”

Bizarrely, Dodd gets the question about academic freedom the wrong way around: that expressing a choice in favour of the blatant war drumming of AUKUS is something that should be one for academics. If he had any idea about despotic university environments, he would be aware that academics, whatever they agree with, will have little say in the matter. Distant, estranged managements, unaccountably enthroned in administrative towers, will be making such decisions for them; the only real free expression will be exercised by those opposing the measure.

April 13, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, Education | Leave a comment

Physicists push for nuclear science education. Their environmental colleagues not so sure

‘Cherish’ the power: Physicists issue call to arms over nuclear skills gap

Associate Professor Tilman Ruff, founder of the Nobel prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, said he feared the nation’s universities were becoming “academic prostitutes” for the nuclear industry – particularly firms that make nuclear weapons.

“The organisations that have historically funded nuclear research at universities have been those with interests in either uranium mining and nuclear power, or nuclear weapons. That’s the problem. There’s not big amounts of money in the more socially constructive areas.”

 https://www.smh.com.au/national/cherish-the-power-physicists-issue-call-to-arms-over-nuclear-skills-gap-20221228-p5c92s.html By Liam Mannix, December 28, 2022

Australia’s physicists say we must learn to cherish nuclear science and invest in training a new generation of experts to run satellites, quantum computers and submarines.

But their colleagues in environmental science are wary of what such an investment might produce.

Australia’s physicists say we must learn to cherish nuclear science and invest in training a new generation of experts to run satellites, quantum computers and submarines.

Australia has committed to buying or building a fleet of American or British-designed nuclear submarines, with the first expected to be in the water late next decade.

They will probably require a crew and workforce of nuclear engineers, technicians and scientists – but Australia lacks a civil nuclear industry.

The nation is already struggling to fill key nuclear safety positions, let alone produce a new workforce, says Dr AJ Mitchell, senior lecturer in the Australia National University’s Department of Nuclear Physics and Accelerator Applications.

“The need is urgent. The captain of our first nuclear submarine is probably already in secondary school today,” he said. “This must be a sovereign capability. And it needs to start yesterday.

“We need to make people understand that ‘nuclear’ is not something to be scared of, but rather to cherish and appreciate.”

Mitchell is leading the development of a national vision for nuclear science, a project launched this month at the Australian Institute of Physics Congress in Adelaide. The strategy includes a national program of nuclear science education.

Nobel laureate and Australian National University vice-chancellor Brian Schmidt made waves last month when urged Australia not to “drag its feet” on the nuclear submarines issue.

The boats represented “one of the biggest training and workforce development challenges Australia has faced”, he said.

That warning adds to pre-existing concerns about the training of engineering and science graduates generally.

Australia has been slowly increasing its number of new engineers, but most of the workforce growth is from overseas labour, according to a report by Engineers Australia.

Fewer students are studying advanced mathematics or physics in year 12, while applications for engineering courses at university fell between 2010 and 2015. Australia has the third lowest number of engineers as a proportion of graduates among developed countries.

Changes to the way engineering courses are funded led the Group of Eight – a coalition of the country’s top research universities – to declare this year that the Australian model for the university education of engineers was “broken” and could not deliver enough skilled engineering graduates to meet the government’s infrastructure investment.

But not all scientists share a conviction that nuclear physics and engineering need investment.

“There is already controversy about the nuclear submarines deal, and anxiety in our region about some sort of arms race and nuclearisation,” said Associate Professor Peter Christoff, a climate policy researcher at the University of Melbourne and former assistant commissioner for the environment in Victoria.

“Significant funding for research into nuclear physics and engineering would send precisely the wrong signals to our regional neighbours and increase their anxieties that what we’re seeing is precisely the start of that nuclear arms race.”

Associate Professor Tilman Ruff, founder of the Nobel prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, said he feared the nation’s universities were becoming “academic prostitutes” for the nuclear industry – particularly firms that make nuclear weapons.

“The organisations that have historically funded nuclear research at universities have been those with interests in either uranium mining and nuclear power, or nuclear weapons. That’s the problem. There’s not big amounts of money in the more socially constructive areas.”

December 29, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, Education | Leave a comment