The Mercury this week revealed UOW had received a foreign investment licence from the Saudi government, which allows it to take the next steps towards a campus in the gulf kingdom.

UOW's Global Enterprises division signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Saudi Ministry of Investment at a ceremony in Riyadh last week.

The move came despite the authoritarian Saudi regime's suppression of rights for women, its criminalisation of same-sex sexual activity, the murder and dismemberment of journalist and regime critic Jamal Khashoggi, and significant other human rights abuses.

Dr Andrew Whelan, the acting branch president of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), said UOW could expect resistance from staff to the move.

"It makes us all look like a bunch of hypocrites," he said.

"We're talking about human rights and so on, while at the same time we're happy to take money from people who have involved themselves in the most appalling forms of behaviour.

"I would be embarrassed to try to describe or justify this to students. How can I say in good faith to students 'oh yes, we support queer and LGBT rights', [when] look at what we're doing, look at the kind of arrangements that we're entering into?

"I marvel at the cravenness and the quite upfront hypocrisy [of] advertising a particular set of values - [then] you see this other kind of behaviour which is utterly cynical and completely mercenary in that the only interest is the extraction of revenue."

UOW declined to comment for this story.

On Tuesday it said moves towards a Saudi campus were only at the preliminary stages; further analysis and "internal and external approvals" would be required.

Dr Whelan, a sociologist, cited Saudi Arabia's killing of hundreds of Ethopian migrants, the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, and starvation via blockade of hundreds of thousands of people in Yemen, as among human rights abuses.

Women in Saudi Arabia are subject to a male guardianship system, and have only been allowed to travel without the guardian's permission since 2019.

It's a stark contrast to the "values" described on UOW's website, which include openness, empowerment, inclusiveness and diversity.

Dr Whelan said an app - called Absher - was used to track Saudi women's travel and their rights were inferior to men's.

"We're talking about doing a deal with that country," he said.

"We're talking about making money out of a deal with that country. It's as though the phrase 'money has no smell' [is] the philosophy here.

"But you can't talk out of both sides of your mouth.

"It's very difficult to align what you're being told we care about, and what we actually do.

"It's compounded by the fact that it's quite difficult to exert any input into how these decisions are made, because they're made by astonishingly well-paid people who are very far removed from how this even looks to people on the ground."

Dr Whelan said there had been no internal communication about the Saudi move, leaving staff to learn about it in the media.

"We heard about it actually from the Mercury," he said.

He anticipated academics who opposed the move would be told UOW Global Enterprises (UOWGE) was "a kind of quasi-private operation" so the decision wouldn't have any bearing on them.

"We would disagree with that because UOWGE, the board of that entity includes the Vice-Chancellor, who runs the university," he said.

"So it's disingenuous to suggest that this is some kind of arm's length phenomenon.

"If you were cynical - I'm not - you might say [that] even if we don't care about anything except money, surely there's a kind of reputational risk around having dealings with a country like Saudi Arabia, given that the university in other contexts, professes commitments to equity and diversity and inclusion and so on - phenomena which Saudi Arabia is not well noted for."

- An earlier version of this story said women in Saudi Arabia could not travel without their guardian's permission. This law was changed in 2019 to allow women over 21 to do so. The text has been corrected.