February 15, 2022
Publication launch: China’s influence in Australian States and Territories
Speech to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute
Tuesday 15 February 2022
I want to commend ASPI, Konrad Adenauer, and Professor Fitzgerald for this remarkable publication. You have brought together a terrific collection of authors whose work I follow closely and admire greatly.
It is a very sobering read.
You have done a great public service by putting into the public domain the comprehensive, sophisticated and coordinated attempts of the Chinese Communist Party, and in particular the United Front Work Department, to undermine Australia’s national consensus on national security and foreign affairs and it frankly should be compulsory reading for our local councils, state and territory government and universities.
It is a window into a road we as a country could have sleepwalked down, had history been only slightly different.
Thanks to wake-up calls like the Dastyari affair, efforts of investigative journalists and the impressive work of our intelligence and security agencies, we have avoided some of the worst pitfalls.
It almost doesn’t bear thinking about what our democracy would have looked like had we not.
While thanks to ASPI and others we now have a much greater awareness of the dangers of foreign interference and espionage, the danger has not passed.
The Annual Threat assessment by the Director General of ASIO Mike Burgess last week is a reminder of that. ASIO now assesses that foreign interference and espionage has passed terrorism as our principal security concern.
Not all of that is directed at the federal level. In fact, it is often targeted at the point of least resistance, and that may be at a level of government that is less well equipped to detect it.
Mike Burgess told the story of a successfully disrupted foreign interference scheme. But our adversaries are determined and creative and they will try again. They probably are right now.
We need to be constantly vigilant to these threats.
I remain concerned about the vulnerability of our state governments, local councils and universities.
The PJCIS inquiry into the higher education sector has uncovered some disturbing insights into the dependency our leading universities have fallen into with their counterpart Chinese universities and the income from Chinese international students, and the effect this has had on their policies.
We will soon hand down our recommendations about the changes required to better protect our higher education sector and ensure it supports Australia’s national interest rather than too often undermining it.
The Committee is also currently reviewing the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme. FITS is a very important step towards greater transparency from those who seek to influence public debate on behalf of foreign governments, but I think we can all see that it has not worked perfectly since its inception, and needs tweaking to ensure that it is appropriately targeting the highest risk conduct.
And I am pleased that thanks to the passage of the Foreign Relation Act the Foreign Minister now has the power to veto agreements not in our national interest, but it is a blunt instrument that cannot prevent all threats.
What is also required from other levels of government is some humility and an acceptance that international relations is not their field of expertise or primary responsibility.
I appreciate that when you’re sitting in a meeting discussing a new local recycling and green waste strategy that it would be tempting to alleviate your boredom with some contributions in the field of geopolitics, but if that is your passion I invite you to stand for the federal parliament, not your local council.
In a more benign security environment most of these international engagements would be harmless, although personally I doubt the value ratepayers gain from multiple sister-city relationships.
But in an era of strategic competition, even with the best will in the world, our sub-national governments and universities are just not equipped with the information or resources they need to navigate these issues in the national interest.
We have moved from a transactional relationship with China to one that more closely resembles a clash of systems, and thanks to the release of the 14 demands we can now clearly see that the Chinese Government believes that it can and should dictate to us our domestic policy settings.
There is now no excuse for naivete about our relationship with China.
Nor is there any excuse about being unaware of the influence operations they wield against us at every level of government to seek to internally divide us and weaken our ability to resist their coercion.
So Peter I hope you have sent copies of this book to our Premiers, Chief Ministers, Mayors and Vice-Chancellors and I hope when they receive it they read it carefully.
Thank you for this very important contribution to the public debate on foreign interference.
