April 20, 2023
JAMES PATERSON: Good morning.
The Senate Select Committee on Foreign Interference through Social Media will hold its first public hearings today and tomorrow. We will be hearing from independent experts from Australia and all around the world, including Commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission in the United States, former officials in the Biden administration, academics and technology companies who work on analysing these applications in the national security threat environment. Tomorrow, we'll particularly be hearing from some victims of foreign interference through social media who have been targeted by foreign authoritarian governments online and on these platforms. The committee will be looking at two principal problems.
First, the problem posed by authoritarian states weaponising Western headquartered social media platforms to interfere in a democracy that includes platforms like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. A number of authoritarian governments have been particularly adept at doing that in recent years.
Secondly, we'll look at the even greater risk posed by social media platforms who are already headquartered in foreign authoritarian countries, and that means they're already beholden to and in some ways directed by those governments. In particular, platforms like TikTok and WeChat. It speaks volumes that the government in Australia, like the governments in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, the European Union, France and many others have already banned TikTok from all government users’ devices in recognition of the espionage risk it poses. But there are millions of other Australians who use applications like this who are also at risk, and we need to develop solutions that protect them. This is a first step in hardening our institutions, in our democracy, to resist these attempts to undermine us, to undermine our social cohesion and to undermine our national unity, because of the strategic environment we operate in, we cannot allow a foreign authoritarian government to have unregulated access to millions of Australians users and their devices.
Secondly, I just want to make some brief comments about the hot mic incident that captured WA Premier Mark McGowan in recent days. What Mark McGowan said in China about Andrew Hastie is completely inappropriate. When we are travelling overseas, politicians, we are not there to represent our political parties, we are there to represent Australia and it is completely inappropriate to attack a fellow Australian politician behind their back in a foreign country and particularly to do so in an authoritarian country like China. Mark McGowan should have been representing the people of Western Australia and their interests, their economic interests and the trading relationship. He should not be wading into foreign policy and national security matters as he himself said he could not do. And I think when he comes back to Western Australia, when he lands in Perth, the first thing he should do is stand up and give a public apology to Andrew Hastie. Happy to take questions.
QUESTION: Great. So, you just come back from a trip to the US, obviously, and that's some of those experts there as a focus of today. What do you think is particularly concerning when you give some concrete examples of foreign interference and how we've experienced it?
PATERSON: Yes. In the United States, TikTok is a particular focus and concern for a number of reasons. One is TikTok is owned by ByteDance, which is headquartered in China and therefore subject to the laws of the Chinese government and the influence of the Chinese Communist Party. We've known in Australia since July last year when they admitted to me in correspondence that Australian user data, just like US user data, is accessible in mainland China and therefore open to that risk. That went from being a theoretical risk to a real risk when last year it was alleged that TikTok used the platform to surveil individual journalists in an attempt to identify those their sources, because those journalists had been writing articles critical of the company. That was the smoking gun that demonstrated that TikTok is a national security risk. And that's one of the reasons why the US focussed on it so closely. We are also very concerned about the way in which the platform could be used and might have been used in the past to pump disinformation into our political system, to support narratives that are in favour of the Chinese Communist Party, to suppress criticism of the Chinese Communist Party and just to sow division and disunity in our society. And that's why they're looking very seriously at the option of potentially banning TikTok altogether, or if not that forcing ByteDance to divest TikTok to a non-Chinese owner to sever that relationship between it and the Chinese Communist Party.
QUESTION: When you talk about disinformation, can you give us some examples of disinformation that Australians have experienced?
PATERSON: Yes, it's very common on platforms like TikTok and WeChat, but also Western social media platforms as well for disinformation about what's happening to the Uyghur people in Xinjiang to be particularly rife. Videos filmed by Chinese state media or influencers showing Uyghurs leading happy lives when we know independent investigators believe that crimes against humanity, if not genocide, are taking place there. And we can't allow disinformation like that to be rife in our political system. We also have an upcoming referendum here in Australia on The Voice. I don't think the Chinese government has a strong view or the Russian government or any other foreign government for that matter, has a strong view one way or the other on whether the Voice should succeed or fail. But they may see it as an opportunity to drive a wedge in Australia to undermine our social cohesion and our national unity, and we can't allow them an opportunity to do so.
QUESTION: Can you just talk us through the victims, what evidence they may be giving about what happened to them?
PATERSON: So one of the victims of foreign interference through social media will be appearing to give evidence tomorrow is Vicky Xu. She's a journalist, an academic, an activist, a researcher, and she's published particularly important research on the oppression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. And as a price for that research, particularly, we suspect, because she herself is ethnically Chinese, although she lives here in Australia, she's been targeted and singled out for horrific abuse, intimidation and coercion online. She's been particularly viciously targeted by what appears to be Chinese state actors who are vilifying her and trying to undermine her clearly is an attempt to intimidate her and discourage her from doing that research in the future. That's just one example, unfortunately, I fear there are many more of like it.
QUESTION: Just on the RBA, obviously the Treasurer will reveal the 51 recommendations in full at 10 am. What do you hope to see and what do you think needs to change with the Reserve Bank?
PATERSON: From the media reports this morning, the proposed changes look like they are very far reaching and significant. The body that's been conducting the review has been consulting with the Opposition and the Shadow Treasurer throughout the process. We certainly welcome that engagement and we welcome the release of the report today and an opportunity to consider it and then take it through our party processes. But our starting point is that we will be bipartisan about this because monetary policy stability is an incredibly important feature of any advanced economy and it would not be a good thing for Australia if every time the government changed our monetary policy changed. That would undermine confidence in the RBA and ultimately undermine confidence in our financial system.
QUESTION: In terms of who is being brought onto the board, obviously it's been split into two parts, do you think we should have union leaders on the board?
PATERSON: Look, it really depends on what the final recommendations are and which direction the government goes in. If there is to be a governance board of the RBA, then obviously governance experts should be primarily appointed to that. If there is to be an interest rate setting board of the RBA, a monetary policy board of the RBA, then monetary policy experts should primarily be appointed to that. But it's a matter for the government to decide who meets that criteria.
QUESTION: And just back to the committee, can you explain what the outcome would be, what concrete things will occur once its finish?
PATERSON: So the committee is due to report to the parliament by August of this year and I'm hoping that we are able to provide the government with a number of concrete suggestions that they can take up to harden our systems and our institutions against these sort of attacks. We'll look at a full range of options from regulating social media platforms, from bolstering our own defences, public education campaigns to raise awareness about the risks of foreign interference and disinformation, anything which will help Australia navigate the difficult years that we have ahead as our regional security environment deteriorates. It's very clear to me that the status quo can't prevail. We cannot allow and continue to allow governments that seek to economically coerce Australia or intervene in our democracy and launch cyber attacks against us to have unregulated access to millions of Australians' devices on platforms that increasingly, particularly young Australians, are using as their main source of news and information about the world.
Thank you.
ENDS
