The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) has given a dramatic warning that sophisticated hackers backed by foreign governments are increasingly targeting Australian infrastructure such as telecommunications and airports.

ASIO chief Mike Burgess warned we are now at “the threshold for high-impact sabotage”.

He said authoritarian regimes are more willing to disrupt or destroy critical infrastructure to damage the economy, undermine Australia’s war-fighting capability, and sow social discord:

Imagine the implications if a nation state took down all the [telecommunications] networks? Or turned off the power during a heatwave? Or polluted our drinking water? Or crippled our financial system? I assure you; these are not hypotheticals – foreign governments have elite teams investigating these possibilities right now.

Burgess also said foreign spies are increasingly targeting the private sector to steal trade secrets to give foreign companies a commercial advantage.

So what exactly is the nature of this serious threat? And what can Australian companies, businesses and their leaders do to protect from the threat?

State-backed hackers targeting companies

Burgess has previously warned of the “unprecedented” threat of espionage and foreign interference.

At a conference on Wednesday, he ramped up that warning. He said although foreign spies usually target government information, they are now increasingly targeting the private sector, including customer data.

In one example given by the spy boss, nation-state hackers compromised the computer network of a major Australian exporter and stole commercially sensitive information. This gave the foreign country a significant advantage in contract negotiations.

In another case, they stole the blueprints of an Australian innovation and mass-produced cheap knock-offs that nearly bankrupted the innovator.

Foreign companies connected to intelligence services have also sought to buy access to sensitive personal data sets and collaborate with university researchers developing sensitive technologies.

These threats are significant – an estimated A$2 billion of trade secrets and intellectual property are stolen from Australian companies by cyber spies each year.

The risks of high-impact sabotage

Burgess said authoritarian regimes are now willing to go even further and act dangerously by engaging in “high harm” activities, such as sabotage.

Advances in technology are making it easier for foreign countries to obtain what they need to conduct sabotage. Sabotage, and particularly cyber-enabled sabotage, is low-cost and deniable, but potentially high-impact.

Burgess revealed authoritarian states are attempting to penetrate Australia’s critical infrastructure, including water, transport, telecommunications and energy networks. The attempts are “highly sophisticated” and testing for vulnerabilities in networks.

Once they have penetrated networks, they are “actively and aggressively” mapping systems, seeking to maintain undetected access that enables them to conduct sabotage at any time.

Burgess provided a very real example involving Chinese hackers known as Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon. While Salt Typhoon penetrated the telecommunications system in the United States, Volt Typhoon compromised US critical infrastructure to “pre-position” for potential sabotage.

“And yes, we have seen Chinese hackers probing our critical infrastructure, as well,” he said.

To understand how devastating such an attack would be here, Burgess pointed to the recent Optus outage that lasted less than a day and affected calls to Triple Zero.

The Australian Institute of Criminology has estimated cyber-enabled sabotage of critical infrastructure would cost the economy A$1.1 billion per incident.

On Thursday, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said China had lodged a protest with the Australian government about the ASIO chief’s comments.

What does the law say?

Espionage, foreign interference and sabotage are all crimes in Australia. While our laws are broad enough to capture the kinds of conduct described by Burgess, we cannot rely on criminal prosecutions to address this problem.

This is because of the practicalities of enforcing laws against offenders who may not be identifiable or may be located overseas.

Instead of relying on the criminal law, we all need to be aware of the risks and take a proactive approach to security.

So what should you do?

According to Burgess, Australian companies, businesses and their leaders can do several things to protect their networks from espionage and sabotage:

• understand what is valuable and what is vulnerable
• consider what data, systems, services and people are important to your business and your customers
• consider what data, systems, services and people are at risk
• think about where things are stored, who has access and how well are they protected.

He advises the threats are constantly changing, and responses need to keep up and keep changing, too.

Burgess encouraged leaders and boards to ask:

If these threats are foreseeable, and our vulnerabilities are knowable, what are we doing to manage this risk – both at the operational and governance level?

Are you taking reasonable steps to manage the risk effectively and to prepare for, prevent and respond to a disruption?

Sarah Kendall, Adjunct Research Fellow, The University of Queensland; Griffith University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Australians think students are being asked to pay far too much for their degrees.

Just under half (47%) of Australians surveyed by YouGov in June 2025 believe a worker on an average income should be able to pay off the debt for a standard three-year degree within five years.

When it comes to the cost of a degree, 58% believe a student should pay A$5,000 or less per year – less than a third of what arts students now pay.

Just under one in five, or 18%, believe a standard degree should be free – as it was 50 years ago, when the Whitlam Labor government introduced free university education in 1974. This ended in 1989, when in a world first, the Hawke Labor government introduced the income contingent Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) – which is still with us today. It has continued to evolve, with costs to students rising with successive governments since.

Today, thanks to the Job Ready Graduates scheme introduced by the Morrison Coalition government in 2021, the cost of an arts degree has risen to over A$50,000.

Unsurprisingly, the Universities Admissions Centre found that concern over HECS debt influences the decision to attend university for 40% of Year 12 students.

How did we get here?

Free education

The evolution of Australian universities has passed through three distinct phases. These were first defined by Hannah Forsyth and paraphrased by John Quiggin as: the sandstone era from 1850 to 1945 that saw each state establish its own university; the era of expansion from 1945 to the election of the Hawke Labor government in 1983; and the era of transformation from the 1980s to today.

The post-World War II era of expansion saw the Commonwealth take over primary funding for universities, while leaving the states in charge of governance. This split responsibility continues to the present day as a source of regulatory incoherence.

In this era of sweeping social and economic change, ahead of the 1972 election in his “It’s Time” speech, Whitlam declared:

We will abolish fees at universities and colleges of advanced education. We believe that a student’s merit rather than a parent’s wealth should decide who should benefit from the community’s vast financial commitment to tertiary education. And more, it’s time to strike a blow for the ideal that education should be free.

For many, Whitlam’s 1974 reforms remain the high water mark. But while university education was free of charge, it was not freely available. Limited places meant problems of equity and access remained.

Profit in universities – from the 1980s

The Dawkins reforms in the 1980s, named for education minister John Dawkins in the Hawke Labor government, remade Australia’s higher education sector. In many ways, the basic structure and market orientation that he put in place remain intact, including incentives for universities to compete internationally and operate like corporate entities.

Competition between universities and their embrace of a profit motive has suited successive governments. It has meant universities increasingly raise revenue from market-based sources, including student fees, rather than relying on the public purse. In 1995, the federal government spent 0.9% of GDP on universities, with this dropping a third to 0.6% in 2021 (implying a $6.5 billion reduction).

To put it another way, in the 1980s the federal government contributed around 80% of the sector’s funding, now it is closer to 40%, while the number of students has more than tripled to over 1.6 million.

Dawkins increased the size of the sector, which opened up access and led to a more than doubling of the percentage of Australians who study at university (from 2 in 10, to 4 in 10 people today). He did so by transforming colleges of advanced education and institutes of technology into universities.

Dawkins and Hawke built a system that fused Labor’s aspiration for fairness and equality with their own stamp of economic rationalism that was then very much in vogue.

Government policies included floating the Australian dollar to integrate the Australian economy with global markets, allowing foreign banks into Australia, reducing tariffs, and privatising or corporatising government-
owned enterprises such as QANTAS, Telecom (now Telstra) and the Commonwealth Bank. University policy directed towards corporatisation and competing in international markets was yet another example.

Under the new HECS scheme, university students were charged $1,800 a year, regardless of the course they were studying. Repayments, at 1% of income, started once their pay reached $22,000, rising to 2% at $25,000.

Domestic enrolments soared and lecture halls heaved as the system welcomed thousands of new students, many of them the first in their family to attend university.

International students: a huge change

During the Dawkins era of rapid growth, the Hawke government introduced a full-fee-paying system for international students.

Higher education expert Andrew Norton from Monash Business School described it as one of the most important higher-education policy decisions ever made: “Public universities proved to be surprisingly entrepreneurial, sparking double-digit annual international enrolment growth rates through the 1990s.”

The nation’s universities thrived among international competition, becoming the envy of many other nations in their ability to attract the best and brightest from around the world. In 2024, international students made up 26% of total enrolments in Australian universities.

The shift to attract international students had many flow-on effects, including Australian universities increasingly playing the international rankings game. These are scored by organisations such as QS and Times Higher Education with universities vying to become one of the top 200, 100 or even 50 universities in the world. The scoring is weighted in favour of research over student satisfaction, leading universities to prioritise the former while the latter has eroded.

Australia has achieved remarkable success in international university rankings. In the 2026 QS rankings, for example, Australia has nine universities in the top 100, more than any other nation except the United States and the United Kingdom. And on a per capita basis, Australia far exceeds those nations.

When it comes to university rankings, Australia outperforms the world. This matters not just for bragging rights or prestige, but because rankings are a key attractor of international students.

This has produced a self-reinforcing cycle. Universities prioritise research, which boosts their rankings, thereby attracting more international students, whose course fees provide the income to fund research, and so on.

Notably, the education of Australian students does not fit within this dynamic; at best, they are cross-subsidised by the additional income from their international counterparts. The system incentivised this as government funding declined, especially so for major universities able to compete on the world stage.

The Dawkins reforms sowed the seeds for decades of over-reliance on international students and the revenue they generate. They also propelled universities down an increasingly corporatised path. As the editors of the 2013 book, The Dawkins Revolution, 25 Years On, put it:

Dawkins […] turned colleges into universities, free education into HECS, elite education into mass education, local focuses into international outlooks, vice-chancellors into corporate leaders […] He remodelled higher education and how it was funded in only a few years.

Unlimited bachelor degrees – at a cost

Such radical change has had many unintended consequences with which governments have been grappling ever since.

A change of government in 1996 brought new policies under Liberal prime minister John Howard. This included replacing the single course fee under HECS with differential course fees, whereby students able to earn higher salaries on graduation (in areas such as business and law) were charged more.

The sector underwent significant reform again in 2012, with the Gillard Labor government scrapping capped student places to usher in the demand-driven system recommended by the 2008 Bradley Review. Universities could enrol unlimited numbers of Australian bachelor-degree students into any discipline other than medicine and be paid for each of them.

The number of bachelor-degree students soared but the system groaned under the expense. As Andrew Norton observed:

The policy ended because of cost. By 2017, demand-driven funding had caused spending to increase by more than 50% in real terms since 2008. From 2013 to 2017, every federal budget included an attempt to curb higher education spending, while keeping the demand-driven system.

The Turnbull Coalition government ultimately responded by freezing bachelor-degree spending.

$50,000 arts degrees

The system veered off the rails with Morrison’s Job-Ready Graduates in 2021. This blunt, ill-conceived policy removed the link introduced by the Howard government between student fees and graduate earnings in favour of setting prices based upon what the government wanted students to study.

The idea was that a strong price signal would steer students away from the arts and humanities into areas of national labour shortage such as mathematics, agriculture and nursing. It took the idea of a market for higher education to an entirely new level, distancing the system even further from the notion of education as a public good.

The policy failed in its own terms and also failed the nation as a whole. While the plan was, for example, to use high prices for arts degrees and low prices for agriculture degrees to change student choices, it was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how students choose what to study.

A potential history student did not seek a career in farming, nor did a student passionate about philosophy shift to mathematics. Instead, it made the entire university system more socially regressive and inequitable.

Price has not proved to be a significant determinant of choice between degrees. One study found that fewer than 1 in 50 students changed their field of study due to differential fees.

But while price has little impact on what degree to enrol in, the cost of a young person’s preferred degree can have a life-defining influence on whether they study or not. Not only are students now lumbered with higher fees and debt, but many are dissuaded from going to university at all.

Job Ready Graduates introduced deep unfairness. Arts degrees covering areas such as history and English literature moved to the highest fee category with business and law, despite arts graduates earning the lowest graduate incomes and often coming from the most disadvantaged parts of society.

An arts student incurs a debt of $16,992 per year or $50,976 for three years of study, compared with $4,627 a year or $13,881 for three-year degrees in areas including agriculture, statistics and mathematics.

The prices will increase further in 2026. Many arts graduates never earn enough to pay this off because of their low salaries and the ongoing indexation of their debt, effectively incurring a debt until death.

The annual cost of an arts degree is now nine times the original 1989 contribution, a rate well ahead of inflation. Student fees have increased from a third of the salary earned by an arts student on graduation to more than two-thirds.

Extracting more fees from students has led to student debt reaching astronomical levels. It peaked at more than $81 billion before the Albanese Labor government reduced debts by 20% and shaved $16 billion off the total.

Devastating student pressures

Record high fees and the associated debt is only one of the major pressures faced by Australian students. Like the rest of the community, they have also been hit by cost-of-living pressures that have left many in poverty.

As a result, the proportion of students having to support full-time study with full-time work has doubled, from 1 in 14 students in the 1990s to one in seven in 2023. This mix is devastating for students and causes many to drop out. Full-time work or full-time study is difficult enough, let alone trying to combine the two.

Students are taking longer to pay off their debt, now taking 9.9 years on average compared to 7.3 years in 2006. Government policies that permit delaying repayment to higher income levels will further slow this, meaning many graduates will hold student debt well into their thirties as they face other financial challenges, such as securing a home loan or starting a family.

The Albanese government’s one-off decision to wipe 20% off student debt will cut $5,520 from the average graduate debt of $27,600. This makes a meaningful difference for graduates yet to pay off their debt, but it
does nothing to address the problem with the level of the fees in the first place. In particular, the policy provides no benefits to new students.

It is akin to addressing the housing crisis by paying off 20% of every current mortgage without doing anything to reduce the cost of housing.

Urgent need for fixing

The deep problems with student fees are well known. The interim report of the Australian Universities Accord, released in June 2023, said the Job Ready Graduates package needs to be fixed “before it causes long-term and entrenched damage” and that without change the higher education system “will rapidly become unfit for purpose”.

New students will be saddled with the consequences of Job Ready Graduates for the long term. Every day we delay a fix is a bad day for the current cohort of students.

The Productivity Commission joined the call for a “new funding model as a priority” given the “design flaws” of Job Ready Graduates. It said the “differences in student contributions by perceived labour market needs fail to meet their goals while arbitrarily increasing debt burdens on some students”. The Accord’s final report in February 2024, highlighting this unfairness, found the student fee structure needs to be replaced.

The government has yet to act on this. Instead, students must wait for the newly established Australian Tertiary Education Commission to design a new funding and fees model.

This is an edited extract from Aiming Higher: Universities and Australia’s Future by Professor George Williams, published as part of The Australia Institute’s Vantage Point essay series.

George Williams, Vice chancellor, Western Sydney University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Once again, the annual shopping extravaganza known as “Black Friday” is nearly upon us, this year falling on November 28. But the sales are already well underway.

What started as a single-day discounted shopping event on the Friday after Thanksgiving in the United States has blown out to a weeks-long sales festival, in stores and online. And it has spread around much of the world – including to Australia.

It might feel like a great time to try to score a bargain. But this week, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) put retailers on notice. The consumer watchdog announced it would be watching out for various kinds of misleading sales conduct that can be used to trick consumers.

If found to be engaging in misleading or deceptive sales conduct, retailers may face heavy financial penalties. But as a consumer, it also pays to understand how these dodgy tactics work, so you can’t be duped this sales season.

Dodgy sales tactics

The ACCC says it is on the lookout for a range of misleading or deceptive sales advertising tactics. Examples include:

• advertising sales as “storewide” when only some items are discounted
• countdown clocks or timers that show a shorter period than the actual sale (to create false urgency)
• fine-print disclaimers that exclude some items from the sale
• “up to X% off” discounts that only apply to a few items (or the “up to” text is not prominently displayed)
• price comparisons of before and after sale discounts that are not accurate (including where the price has gone up in a short period before the discount was applied).

Sadly, there are many examples of allegedly misleading sales conduct occurring at peak shopping periods.

Following a similar sweep of last year’s Black Friday sales, the ACCC recently fined three retailers for allegedly
misleading customers by advertising discounts as “storewide” when only some items were on sale.

In 2019, the online marketplace Kogan offered a “tax time” discount of 10% on products that had had their price increased immediately before the promotion (by at least 10% in most cases). It was subsequently fined A$350,000 for misleading conduct in breach of Australian Consumer Law.

Why is the ACCC so strict about this kind of conduct?

These examples of dodgy conduct might seem annoying. But they don’t seem earth-shatteringly bad – such as selling physically dangerous products.

Why is the ACCC so concerned about misleading conduct at Black Friday sale time, and indeed retail pricing more generally?

Shouldn’t consumers just be more careful? The answer lies in the cumulative harms of misleading pricing conduct.

Manipulating consumers through marketing

Sales rely on consumers thinking they are getting a good deal on products they want. And sometimes sales marketing seeks to persuade consumers the deal is better than it really is.

Marketing strategies such as countdown timers, strike-through prices or promoted large percentage discounts are designed to appeal to consumers’ emotions and to rush them into closing off a purchase.

Consumers with heightened emotions or feeling pressure to grab a deal are less likely to make a rational assessment of the real value of the discount being offered to them. This is why truth in sales advertising is so important.

What consumer protection laws are for

We have strong protections against misleading conduct in Australia for good reason. If sellers can trick consumers into buying goods at discounts that are actually illusory, those dishonest sellers gain an advantage over honest sellers selling at a transparent and accurate price.

This risks a market that rewards poor conduct and encourages an overall rush to the bottom.

Australian Consumer Law takes the view that consumers should be able take the advertisements they see at face value. Consumers shouldn’t have to assume they are going to be tricked by sellers.

Such an approach would not conform to the object of enhancing the “welfare of Australians” through “the promotion of competition and fair trading” that underlies Australian Consumer Law.

Stopping a bad deal

If you are considering buying goods at the Black Friday sales, it is a good idea to screenshot the item before it goes on sale. That way you can check if the sale discount is genuine and the item is actually the same as the one you want (not an older or cheaper model).

When shopping at a sale, take time to look at the discount offered. Is it a real discount? Does it justify the spend coming up to the holiday period? Discounts may be marked up in an attractive colour but still not represent good value.

Finally, if you think you have been misled by a pricing strategy, such as a discount that isn’t genuine or a fine-print qualification on the discount that is advertised, you can complain to the ACCC.

Ideally, take screenshots of what was advertised and what you received to support your claim to be treated fairly at sales time.

Jeannie Marie Paterson, Professor of Law (consumer protections and credit law), The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.