No one should be surprised Australian politicians have been mingling with foreign spies
No one should be surprised Australian politicians have been mingling with foreign spies
What is espionage has become blurred
The Australia media on Thursday 29th February was abuzz with two stories concerning so-called spies.
First, the Director General of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) Mark Burgess claimed that a person working within a foreign intelligence cell in Australia, dubbed the “A-Team” was offered access to a former but unnamed prime minister.
The second story was that a Chinese-Australian business man and former Liberal political candidate Di Sanh Duong was jailed for two and a half years for attempting to influence a former acting immigration minister, Alan Tudge, Di Sanh Duong is believed to be the first person convicted under the Foreign Interference Act, passed in 2018 by the federal parliament.
Influence operations by foreign governments has been going on in Canberra since the 1950s. Many potential Australians have been cultivated by the US government and associated agencies. This grooming included all expense paid invitations for trips to conferences in the United States and the introduction to officials.
Leaked US Embassy cables in Caberra and consults in Sydney and Melbourne, published by Wikileaks found that former NSW Premier and foreign Minister Bob Carr had been briefing the US embassy since the 1970s on the internal decision making of the Australian Government during the Whitlam era, and on the internal workings of the Australian Labor Party (ALP). This relationship began in the mid 1970s when Carr was president of Young Labor and an education officer of the NSW Labor council. In recent years, Carr has been close to the Chinese, and has been of interest to Australian intelligence organizations in the past.
Wikileaks cables also pointed to former Labor senator Mark Arbib, who was a ‘protected’ US embassy source, passing on information and commentary about Australian politics.
US diplomatic cables also implicated the former Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) president and later prime minister Bob Hawke, saying he regularly conferred with the US Consulate in Melbourne during his ACTU years. Leaked US documents have confirmed what many believed that the US had infiltrated the Australian Labor Party. One cannot forget former ALP party secretary David Combe’s relationship with Soviet diplomat back in 1984, which led to swift action on the part of the Hawke government at the time, in the interests of sovereignty and transparency.
Fast forward to the present, the current foreign minister Penny Wong’s brother is a member of Malaysia-China Chamber of Commerce organization – Youth Entrepreneurs Committee in Malaysia, which is directly funded by the Chinese United Front.
These relationships don’t mean any ill-proprietary. Wong’s relationship is one degree away. In Asia, organizations seek funds from any source willing to provide them.
In Australia today, 5.5 percent of the population are Chinese. Most are proudly Chinese and have a strong loyalty towards China. They are also Australians and proud to be a citizen. The Chinese diaspora doesn’t see any conflict in this. Actions taken to benefit both parties would be considered something positive. This is the culture Australia must deal with as diaspora identity is complex and blurred. The former Liberal MP Gladys Liu had to deal with this. She would always be guilty by association. Just like Penny Wong’s brother, Liu was a member of the China Overseas Exchange Association, purported to be a bureau within the United Front, Liu also associated with members of the local Chinese community, who were also purported to be connected wit the CCP. So, was Liu a patriotic Australian trying to bring Australian-Chinese relationship closer, or a person of influence?
If one reads Clive Hamilton’s 2018 tome ‘The Silent Invasion: China’s Influence in Australia’, no one will be surprised with the networking, financial enticements, donations to political parties, organizational connections with universities and labour unions, and even ‘honey traps’ set by foreign entities carried out at all levels of Australian politics and government today. China is doing at an unprecedented level, what the US did in the 50s onwards in Australia. What China has is a massive diaspora, which extends Chinese influence at all levels in Australian society.
The author knows for a fact, this was all studied and planned by the Chinese more than two decades ago, where Chinese academics, the diaspora in Australia, and intelligence worked hand in hand to develop an executable multipronged strategy. This strategy is much more sophisticated than what Philip Agee described about the CIA in the 50s and 60s, in ‘Inside the Company: CIA Diary’.
Today, many acts of espionage are not even recognized as such, disguised as cultural exchange, mutual cooperations, or just friendships. One will not even know they have come in contact with a foreign operative.
Espionage has become blurred today.
Originally published in Eurasia Review 29th February 2024.
Subscribe Below:
White Australians have always had a racist and paranoid streak about them when it comes to " Ching Chong Chinamen". From the time couple centuries or so ago when they were conducting massacres on Chinese and poisoning their Wells to present times it has always been about the "evil Chinamen".
In the 60s and early 70s when an uncle of mine was studying in Australia he was bringing back a shed load of racist stuff from White Australia, and my, did my uncle get an education in racist stuff! (Mine came from Blighty) Politicians in Oz would visit universities and warn about the "Yellow Peril", how they are drifting in big sampans toward Oz. While they were coming, they were breeding and producing more and more Chinamen. When the Chinese arrive Oz, they would take their women, footballs, rugby balls, cricket balls... and turn the Whites into their slaves...
The Chinese were not not the only ones at the receiving end, Australia's real natives were called Abos and a favourite sport was going to look for Aboriginals and beat them up after a night drinking their awful beer. The sport is called Abo-bashing, and there's also the Italian, Greek, Indian versions, I mean the Whites beat up the blackies, not the other way round.
White Oz has always scuked up to Uncle Sam, Australia has always been fertile ground for some of the worst propaganda the US can easily feed to the glorified convicts - who still look up to Mother England - while in recent decades, Mother England has made it much more difficult for the fcuking Croc Dundees and Edna Everidges to enter the UK.
Australia is taking the orders from the US as the latter is inventing all the excuses to make China an adversary and eventually the stooges and cannon fodder for the US would volunteer itself to massacre the "Chinks, Gooks, etc". Not forgetting the Vietnam War, the Aussie stooges went all the way to Afghanistan where they did their stint massacring the innocent. Malaysians should remember the loyal subjects of Mrs Windsor came to fight and kill our patriots for their queen.
There would be plenty yet the faithful poodle of the US would come up with about saving the world from the "Chinese communists". There's already all the tropes and the props. We've had plenty about "alliances", the US is really great at getting others to die for them. Since not many other countries are interested in taking on China, it will again be the bloodthirsty Oz SAS v the Chinese. Just keep buying US arms and the Master would be happy.
The usual "good guys" (US, UK) are busy looking for "reds under the beds", "spies" are uncovered, there's lots of Cold War drama going on... No, I don't give a rat's arse about the same old drama and paranoia of part of the West. If there's a war around here, I won't be terribly unhappy, I'll just let Uncle Sam and white Ozlanders die for me fighting the Chinese, North Koreans, and whoever. I could care less who's buying what politician, aren't they all to be bought and sold?
And if it is the Israelis who are buying politicians, spying, etc, would anyone
see any problem? Would anyone even be talking about the matter?
Chinese or any coloured person will always have to be whiter than white to be accepted in an Anglo Saxon country. No such requirement is necessary for a person from Ireland, Poland, Italy etc. These people can criticise the govt to the nth degree but for a coloured person, if he/she does so, he/she will be asked to go back to where he came from. Australia now cancelled applications from China students to some Aussie universities, usually the 2nd/3rd ranking ones, and openly seeking Indian students. I guess these chaps from India can suck up to the whites.