Australia's Foreign Relations (State and Territory Arrangements) Amendment Bill 2026
Mr GOSLING (Solomon) (13:09): I rise to speak in support of the Australia's Foreign Relations (State and Territory Arrangements) Amendment Bill 2026. This bill updates a piece of legislation that has, in six years of quiet operation, become one of the more consequential tools Australia has for regulating Australia's engagement with the world. The Foreign Arrangements Scheme does not make headlines the way a trade deal or a defence pact does.
It covers a broad range of relations and how Australia interacts globally. It sits underneath almost everything this country does internationally below the level of this parliament. That includes every friendship agreement a state government signs, every research partnership a public university enters and every sister city arrangement a local council strikes—and where I'm from, in Darwin, there are certainly many of those.
This bill reforms Australia's Foreign Arrangements Scheme, which oversees international agreements entered into by state, territory and local governments and public universities. The bill follows the 2024 independent review by Rosemary Huxtable, which found that the scheme was broadly working but needed to be more risk focused and less burdensome. Since 2020, more than 22,000 arrangements have been notified under the scheme.
There are a number of key changes in this bill. The most important relates to national interest. The bill will explicitly make Australia's national interest, including security, economic and foreign policy interests, a central objective of the scheme.
The bill also brings stronger risk management, which allows conditions to be placed on foreign arrangements rather than simply approving or rejecting them, including conditions imposed after an arrangement begins. Then there will be whole-of-government information sharing, allowing information gathered under the scheme to be shared with relevant Commonwealth agencies; broader coverage, capturing arrangements involving overseas campuses of Australian universities; change in relation to noncompliance, giving the minister more proportionate options for dealing with inadvertent breaches; less red tape, with removal of unnecessary approval requirements for low-risk matters, including minor variations and renewals of previously assessed arrangements; greater clarity, with clarification of concepts such as institutional autonomy to make compliance easier; better transparency, with modernisation of the public register so that it remains accurate and focuses on significant decisions; and more administrative flexibility, allowing targeted delegation and limited extensions to decision-making timeframes for complex cases.
The bottom line is that our government is arguing that the bill strikes a balance between protecting Australia from foreign interference and strategic risks and making it easier to undertake legitimate international engagement in the national interest. In essence, it is a risk based tightening of the scheme, combined with deregulation for low-risk arrangements.
This is what sensible parties of government do. We manage risk to make sure we can claim value in as much of the upside as possible while minimising the downside risk. The case for the original act, back in 2020, was fairly straightforward: foreign policy is and must remain a Commonwealth responsibility.
But state and territory governments, local councils and our public universities have, over decades, built up thousands of their own direct relationships with foreign governments and foreign institutions—naturally and sensibly, in the overwhelming majority of cases—in pursuit of trade, research and cultural ties that benefit their communities. The problem was never the existence of these relationships; the issue was that no-one in Canberra could see all of them at once, and, without that visibility, this country had no way of knowing when one of them might cut across our national interest.
In the years since, the Commonwealth has used this act to step in where a state-level arrangement no longer stacked up against Australia's foreign policy. These interventions are worth pausing on because they show the framework doing exactly what it was built to do—not blocking the thousands of ordinary partnerships that make up the bulk of the register but catching the small number that genuinely warrant Commonwealth attention on risk informed grounds.
Darwin and Palmerston in the Northern Territory—the place that I'm so proud to represent—sit closer to Dili, the capital of Timor-Leste, and Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, than they do to this very building, the seat of our national democracy. Our government, our university and our local councils carry a number of longstanding friendship agreements and education partnerships with overseas provinces and institutions, some dating back to the 1990s and all of them sitting on the national foreign arrangements register, alongside more than 9,000 other arrangements notified by governments and universities right across the country.
These are, almost without exception, at the run-of-the-mill, low-risk end of the scheme—for example, education exchanges, twinning arrangements, research collaborations. We need to be able to differentiate agreements with foreign entities and actors based on risk. The kinds of arrangements described above should be treated proportionally rather than put through the same degree of rigour and due process that higher risk arrangements should rightly be subjected to.
Territorians don't need reminding of what happens when a decision with international implications gets made without anyone in Canberra seeing it first. In 2015, the then CLP government leased the Port of Darwin to a Chinese-owned company for 99 years. This was a decision made entirely at the Territory level by the CLP government, with no requirement to notify the Commonwealth beforehand and no opportunity for it to consider the proposal.
To be clear, that lease sits outside the scope of this act, then and now, as critical infrastructure transactions are governed by a separate regime entirely. But the alarm that it caused right across the political spectrum is illustrative and is a large part of why an appetite for a framework like this one existed in the first place. Territorians know better than most what it feels like to read about a consequential decision in the newspaper instead of being consulted on it.
The bill before the house gives effect to the findings of the 2025 independent review of the scheme, led by Ms Rosemary Huxtable AO PSM. It drew on public submissions from the state and territory governments, who administer these arrangements day to day, from local councils and from the university sector, which has carried much of the scheme's compliance burden since 2020.
Twenty-three recommendations came out of that process. The government has accepted every one of them, and this bill is delivering on that. At the heart of the bill is a change to the test itself.
Currently, the minister assesses a proposed arrangement against whether it adversely affects Australia's foreign relations or is inconsistent with our foreign policy. This bill broadens that test to the national interest, allowing security and economic considerations to be weighed alongside foreign policy, not as an afterthought to it. The bill also gives the minister a genuinely new tool, the power to approve an arrangement subject to conditions, rather than facing the binary choice of approving it outright or refusing it altogether.
For an arrangement that is broadly sound but carries one specific area of concern, that is a far more proportionate response than an outright knockback, and it is a change that state and territory entities themselves have asked for through the review process. Where the bill streamlines, it does so with real practical effect for jurisdictions like the Northern Territory.
Low-risk arrangements and entities can now be deemed non-core by rule, cutting them out of the full approval pathway. Non-core arrangements move to a single-step notification process rather than requiring notice before entry and again after. Critically, where the minister has already approved a core arrangement once, a minor variation no longer triggers a full re-approval process from scratch.
The bill makes a series of further improvements that, taken together, modernise how the scheme actually functions. It establishes a proper framework for sharing the information collected through notifications across government, so that agencies with a legitimate interest in an arrangement are not working in the dark, while keeping that information subject to the same obligations of confidence that apply today.
It requires state and territory entities to notify the minister when an arrangement is terminated early and when a longstanding arrangement exists with an entity newly prescribed under the rules, with reasonable transition windows of three to six months built in rather than having an unrealistic overnight compliance deadline which closes in gaps that left the register incomplete.
It brings the overseas campuses of Australian universities within scope for the first time, addressing a real gap where a campus with separate legal status offshore fell outside the definition of a state or territory entity altogether. And it is very important that we are closing those gaps. The bill also makes a consequential amendment to the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Act, or ASIO Act, clarifying that decisions made under this act are not 'prescribed administrative action' for the purposes of ASIO's security assessment framework.
This ensures that security advice feeding into a ministerial decision under this scheme is treated consistently with that decision itself, rather than subject to a separate and potentially conflicting review pathway. Every one of these changes was tested against the same question that the Huxtable review was asked to answer—that is, does the scheme's current settings match where the real risk actually sits?
Six years of operation shows us the risk is concentrated in a small number of arrangements that warrant close and ongoing scrutiny. The volume sits overwhelmingly in low-risk, long-running relationships that were being processed as if they carried the same risk profile as everything else. This bill fixes this mismatch and gets the balance right.
It enables seizing the benefits of upside while minimising the downside risks. For a place like the Northern Territory, getting that balance right matters more than most. We are, geographically and economically, one of the most internationally engaged parts of this country.
Our proximity to our regional partners and friends shapes almost everything we do. Our university, our government—the NT government—and our councils will keep building those international partnerships because they bring international students, researchers and trading relationships to the Top End that our territory genuinely needs. They should be able to do that without unnecessary friction on the arrangements that, plainly, warrant none.
This bill gets out of the way of good arrangements with a reasonable and low-risk profile, while increasing risk mitigation on those for which that is not the case. This bill is not a retreat from international engagement or the Commonwealth's stymieing it, and it is not built on the premise that every foreign partnership or deal is problematic. Our Labor federal government has been revitalising our relationships in the region, and progressing and driving the development and enhancement of our relationships all over the world, and that work is continuing.
The government has been explicit through this whole process that the value of these partnerships is real—economically, culturally and strategically—and that the scheme exists to protect that value, not to discourage it. A framework that made every low risk-arrangement as burdensome as a genuinely sensitive one would not make this country safer. It would teach state and territory entities to see Commonwealth oversight as an obstacle rather than as a safeguard, which it is.
That is precisely the wrong lesson for a scheme that depends on good-faith cooperation from the jurisdiction it covers. This bill gets that balance right. The last thing that we need in jurisdictions like mine, in Darwin and Palmerston in the Northern Territory, is for the balance not to be got right.
What our experience in the Northern Territory also shows is that inappropriate decisions made at a sub-federal government and sub-federal parliamentary level can be problematic, so we need to make sure that those risks are managed appropriately. This bill gets that balance right, and I commend it to the House.