APN Research Brief: Legislative Pressure: How a New Bill is Forcing Australian Universities to Divest from ‘Dirty' Industries

The “Higher Education Support Amendment (End Dirty Uni Partnerships) Bill 2025” is a live piece of Australian legislation, debated in the Senate on 6 November 2025.¹ It would require every higher education provider that receives Commonwealth funding to disclose, and then divest from, ties to fossil fuel, weapons, gambling and tobacco companies, and would bar anyone with financial ties to those industries from sitting on a university’s governing body.²

The Bill has drawn strong support from campus stakeholders — a 97% in-favour vote at a Melbourne branch meeting of the National Tertiary Education Union⁵ and a 98% in-favour vote at a National Union of Students conference² — and equally strong opposition on the Senate floor, where its definitions have been criticised as “hopelessly vague” and its compliance and governance requirements as “unworkable.”²

Universities are already substantial property developers and institutional investors in their own right, including a $2 billion joint venture at UNSW’s Randwick Health and Education Precinct⁶ and a residential precinct at the University of Canberra with an expected gross sale value exceeding $1 billion.⁷ That means legislative and reputational pressure to sever “dirty” partnerships has a direct bearing on how universities manage their real estate and investment portfolios, not just their research funding.

Five days after the Bill’s Senate debate, Monash University confirmed it would not renew its major partnership with Woodside Energy⁹ — a concrete, time-stamped example of exactly the kind of divestment decision the Bill is designed to accelerate. Capital exiting “dirty” partnerships has an obvious destination: purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA) and build-to-rent (BTR) attracted AUD $5.7 billion in institutional transactions in just two quarters of 2025,⁸ making them a deep, liquid market for universities and their capital partners to pivot toward.

The Bill is an Australian Greens Private Senators’ Bill, introduced and moved by Senator Mehreen Faruqi, Deputy Leader of the Australian Greens.¹ Its second reading was moved and debated in the Senate on 6 November 2025,¹ and as a private senators’ bill its parliamentary status remains “being debated.”

Senator Faruqi’s stated intent is to force an ethical realignment of the higher education sector, designed to “dent the armour of companies who profit off the misery of humanity” by “denying these dirty industries access to the research prowess and funds of our public universities.”² She has framed the core purpose as ensuring universities “advance only public good, not contribute to these corporate industries that kill people.”²

The Bill would amend the Higher Education Support Act 2003 to impose the following requirements on any higher education provider receiving Commonwealth funding, in each case defined against “fossil fuels, gambling, tobacco, and weapons industries”:²

A further, less-noticed provision may matter more in practice than the headline mandates. The Bill’s proponent has acknowledged the potential funding shortfall divestment could create, and the Bill text states that “where compliance with these obligations results in a quantifiable loss for a higher education provider, the Commonwealth may provide reasonable compensation.”² That compensation clause removes the university sector’s most obvious financial objection to divestment: by committing to offset a quantifiable loss, it reframes a board’s decision not to divest as a governance or ethical failure rather than a defensible financial one.

Senator Faruqi’s second reading speech² set out specific, existing university ties to the industries the Bill targets, demonstrating the legislation responds to live arrangements rather than a hypothetical risk. On weapons, the speech cited the Australian National University holding 8,517 shares in BAE Systems as of March 2024 and investing in Elbit Systems as recently as March 2025; Deakin University signing a memorandum of understanding with Hanwha Defence Australia in September 2024; and Western Sydney University entering a three-year MOU with Lockheed Martin announced in October 2025. On fossil fuels, the speech cited an August 2025 Australia Institute report finding that 26 of Australia’s 37 public universities take money from fossil fuel companies. On gambling, it cited the University of Sydney’s Centre of Excellence in Gambling Research, launched with a $600,000 funding commitment from the gambling industry.²

Support for the Bill among students and staff is well documented. A Melbourne branch meeting of the National Tertiary Education Union, with 315 attendees, passed a motion endorsing the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement with a 97% vote in favour, explicitly calling on university management to divest from weapons and arms manufacturers and cut ties with the defence industry and militaries generally.⁵ That aligns with the NTEU National Executive’s May 2024 statement calling on all Australian universities to “critically review, disclose and divest from research and commercial partnerships with firms and entities directly involved in military support.”¹³

Student sentiment tells a similar story. A National Union of Students referendum on universities taking funds from weapons companies drew more than 5,000 student votes in favour of divestment,²¹⁴ and a subsequent motion at the NUS conference passed with 98% in favour.² NUS Education Officer James McVicar summarised the sentiment publicly: “Students have spoken. In the National Student Referendum on Palestine, we demanded an end to weapons companies on our campuses… Instead, they churn out profits for climate criminals and arms dealers.”¹⁵

No public submission specifically opposing the Bill from Universities Australia, the sector’s peak body, could be identified.⁵ The most detailed opposition case instead comes from the Senate floor itself, in second-reading speeches by Senators Kovacic and Blyth,² which function as a proxy for the broader sector’s concerns about regulatory overreach.

The central criticism is that the Bill’s definitions are “hopelessly vague.”² Opponents argue the weapons-industry definition (“manufacture or sale of weapons, weapon parts or armaments”) is broad enough to capture kitchen knives and baseball bats, and could therefore prohibit university partnerships with major retailers such as Coles, Woolworths and Big W. The same critique extends to gambling — a definition broad enough to capture small businesses, newsagents selling scratchies, or a pub with a Friday-night meat-tray raffle — and to fossil fuels, where a definition covering “exploration… extraction or exportation” could rule out any logistics company, shipping company or mining company.²

The governance clause draws the sharpest criticism. Because “investment” is defined broadly enough to include superannuation, opponents argue the Bill would require universities to vet the diversified super funds of every prospective board member — a process they call “completely absurd.”² They also argue the Bill would curtail research: because “anything can be weaponised,” it would take quantum computing, artificial intelligence and computer science “completely off the table” for engineering and mathematics faculties.² This would land on top of an already rising compliance burden — a 2023 report found the University of Queensland alone had seen a 63% increase in compliance costs over the preceding decade.²⁰

There is a sharper point buried in the opposition’s own argument. A narrowly drawn law creates a simple, binary compliance risk; a vague one creates an unquantifiable, systemic risk that a university’s general counsel cannot safely clear against any complex partner — a bank, a builder, a logistics firm, a retailer — that might have some ancillary tie to a prohibited sector.² That “chilling effect” means a cautious university board has an incentive to divest pre-emptively, whether or not the Bill itself ever passes into law.

The Bill’s reach extends further than research funding because Australian universities are themselves major property developers and land-development partners. UNSW’s Randwick Health and Education Precinct is an A$2 billion joint venture with NSW Health, described as the biggest estate development in the university’s 70-year history.⁶ The University of Canberra is fifteen years into a partnership with developer Peet on a residential-based, mixed-use village across a 15-hectare portion of its Belconnen campus, with an expected gross sale value exceeding $1 billion.⁷ The Australian National University’s Kambri cultural precinct is an A$260 million redevelopment forming part of a 20-year campus masterplan.⁶ Monash University has broken ground on its own purpose-built student accommodation — a new 252-bed, seven-storey residence at its Clayton campus.²²

These are not simple land sales; they are long-term joint ventures and partnerships with finance and construction firms.⁶⁷ That structure is the transmission mechanism through which the Bill’s risk reaches university real estate: under the Bill’s broad definitions, if a university’s joint-venture partner — a construction firm, developer or capital partner — is itself found to have exposure to fossil fuels or weapons, the entire multi-billion-dollar precinct could be drawn into the same regulatory and reputational risk. That gives universities a direct incentive, beyond the Bill’s research-funding provisions, to favour “clean capital” partners on their own development pipelines.

The clearest evidence that legislative pressure is already moving university decisions, ahead of any bill actually passing, is the timeline around Monash University and Woodside Energy.

• 6 November 2025: The “Higher Education Support Amendment (End Dirty Uni Partnerships) Bill 2025” is formally debated in the Senate,¹ putting regulatory and reputational risk squarely in front of university boards nationwide.
• 11 November 2025 (five days later): Monash University confirms to the “Stop Woodside Monash” activist group that it will not renew its partnership with Woodside Energy, Australia’s largest fossil fuel company.⁹ The change is concrete: Building 94 will no longer be known as the “Woodside Building.”⁹
• The link: News coverage explicitly connected the two events, reporting that the decision “follows a Senate debate last week on the Greens’ End Dirty Uni Partnerships Bill.”⁹

Senator Faruqi welcomed the decision directly: “This is a huge win for staff and students who have been campaigning for years… Our universities should be places that advance the public good, not help morally bankrupt companies like Woodside greenwash their climate crimes.”¹⁰

The five-day gap matters. Activist campaigning at Monash had been running “for years”⁹ without securing a divestment decision; it was the Senate debate that supplied a new, public, time-bound event risk the university’s board could not leave unaddressed. It is a template for how legislative pressure can combine with existing activist pressure to tip a board toward divestment well before, or even entirely without, the underlying bill becoming law.

Capital leaving “dirty” partnerships has a clear destination. The Australian purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA) market has 122,000 operational beds and a further 16,000 under construction,²³ yet remains structurally undersupplied: CBRE quantifies unmet demand at 25,000–30,000 PBSA beds in Central and Inner-West Sydney (serving the University of Sydney and UTS) and 15,000–20,000 beds in Melbourne’s CBD and Inner-North (serving the University of Melbourne and RMIT).²⁴ Build-to-rent (BTR) remains a much smaller but fast-growing asset class, currently just 0.2% of Australia’s total housing stock, and both sectors have benefited from rising investor interest over the past several years.²⁶²⁷

The capital markets data already exceeds what universities are likely to need. Savills reported AUD $1.8 billion in Australian “living sector” investment in the second quarter of 2025 alone, 90% of it attributable to a single deal — Greystar and the Future Fund’s acquisition of seven student housing properties from Singapore’s GIC.⁸ A third-quarter 2025 deal for the Aveo senior living platform added a further AUD $3.9 billion, described as Australia’s largest real estate transaction to date.⁸ Together, that is AUD $5.7 billion in institutional “living sector” transactions across just two quarters of 2025 — a market attracting sovereign-level capital (Australia’s Future Fund, Singapore’s GIC) and top-tier global managers (Greystar), not a speculative niche.⁸

This shift is consistent with a broader ESG trend in real estate investment: stakeholder interviews with senior real estate executives identify Australia and Europe as world leaders in applying ESG benchmarks to property investment decisions,²⁸ and Australian researchers at Western Sydney University and UNSW are actively studying how institutional frameworks, including legislation of this kind, shape the ESG strategies of listed real estate investors.²⁹

As a private senators’ bill facing organised opposition in the Senate, the “End Dirty Uni Partnerships” Bill has a low probability of passing in its current form. But the Monash/Woodside case study shows that passage may not be the point. The Bill’s own opponents argue its definitions are so broad they would be nearly impossible to comply with — and that same breadth is what creates an unquantifiable compliance risk that a cautious board would rather avoid than test. On that reading, the Bill’s practical effect on university decision-making can arrive well ahead of, or entirely independent of, its passage into law.

That dynamic — a fast-moving regulatory or legislative development reshaping institutional behaviour long before the underlying law is settled — is precisely the kind of pressure the APN Regulatory Velocity Multiplier™ (APN RVM™) is designed to track. And because divestment pressure acts directly on university balance sheets, investment portfolios and real estate development pipelines, it is also a live input into the APN Meridian™ (Education Value Index), which follows financial and asset conditions across the higher education sector.

For property markets specifically, the practical takeaway is that ESG-driven legislative pressure on institutions should be read as a leading indicator of capital reallocation, not a lagging one. Universities that step back from “dirty” partnerships have an existing, liquid destination for that capital in student accommodation and build-to-rent — sectors already absorbing billions of dollars in institutional transactions each quarter, well ahead of any pressure this Bill might add.

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