Students campaign against Melbourne University’s ‘weapons campus’
The University of Melbourne has begun construction on a new $2 billion “defence” research campus at Fishermans Bend. The campus will allow the university to further its collaboration with international arms manufacturers to design new weapons.
Last year, students demanded that the university divest from partnerships with more than thirteen weapons companies. But now, the university is angling for even closer connections with the defence sector. This is despite at least two of the companies, Boeing and BAE Systems, being warned last year by the UN that their transfers to Israel could make them complicit in war crimes.
Now, UoM students are demanding that the university halt the construction of this “weapons campus” and end its complicity in Israel’s genocide.
The Citizen, a publication of the university’s Centre for Advancing Journalism, reported in February that the university previously petitioned the Department of Defence to “consider greater connectivity” between the proposed Fishermans Bend campus and the Defence Department’s specialist Defence Science and Technology Group, which is also located in the suburb.
“The University claims to be on about the big social challenges and trying to make the world better”, Tilman Ruff, an honorary associate professor and a founder of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, told news.com.au earlier this month.
“It’s hard to see how getting in bed with war profiteers and particularly makers of now illegal weapons of mass destruction fits with trying to do good in the world for the betterment of humanity.”
Boeing manufactures and sells F-15 fighter jets and Apache AH-64 attack helicopters to the Israeli Air Force. BAE Systems, another of the world’s largest defence contractors, is a key supplier to the F-35 fighter jet program.
Documents obtained from the university under Freedom of Information reveal that, after a student protest against a forum hosted by Boeing at the Parkville campus in 2024, the university reprimanded students speaking out against war crimes while reassuring the company of the university’s solid commitment to collaboration at Fishermans Bend.
The “weapons campus” aligns with a broader Victorian government initiative to lure more arms manufacturers and military contractors to the area. Melbourne University will provide space and materials for companies to improve their weapons and hardware. It will also funnel engineering students into the war industries. The campus will serve as the brains behind the bombs.
The university is open about its intent to develop “leading-edge defence technologies” and describes the campus as “a site for multinationals and SMEs to engage in the Defence ecosystem ... supported by our state-of-the-art materials fabrication laboratory, ocean simulation facilities and autonomous robotics testing sites”.
The university is also gushing about the opportunities presented by the federal government’s proposed acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines. It is hard to miss the connection between its positive statements about training nuclear scientists and the Fishermans Bend campus’s intended defence research into “marine systems technologies” and “optimising the performance and security of submarine, ship and amphibious operations in the open ocean and coastal areas”.
Students for Palestine Unimelb opposes collaboration between the university and the military. We have collected signatures from more than 1,000 students for a special general meeting for Palestine, organised by the student union. If four hundred students attend, the meeting’s decisions will be binding on the union. If a mass meeting votes in favour of all motions, the union will campaign against the construction of Fishermans Bend, against all university ties to weapons companies, against the repression of student activism and to organise a fundraiser for the next Freedom Flotilla sailing to break Israel’s blockade and bring aid to Gaza.
