The Australia-China relationship has hit new lows, with China’s ban on a range of imports threatening $20 billion of Australian exports. However, just in the past few days Scott Morrison has said Australia’s position has been wrongly interpreted as siding with the United States over China, and that his government would not make a “binary choice” between the superpowers.
Which makes the funding of the Federal Government-owned think-tank the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a constant anti-Chinese mouthpiece, even more curious. Two of its biggest sources of funding are the US State Department, whose secretary Mike Pompeo has led the charge of global anti-China sentiment, and foreign weapons makers.
ASPI’s annual report, which has just been tabled in Parliament, shows that funding from the US government skyrocketed by 367% over the past financial year alone – to $1,369,773.22.
Moreover, the limited disclosure buried on page 157 of the report suggests all the funds were in some way directed to research projects attacking China. The US payments primarily came through the State Department.
The mother country also tips in
Other foreign governments made significant contributions, with the bulk of their funding contributing to ASPI programs that were either directly or indirectly linked to reports critical of China. The UK was ASPI’s second biggest foreign benefactor, contributing a total of $455,260. The governments of Japan, Israel, and Netherlands and NATO poured in another $66,072.
In the 2019-20 financial year, foreign (non-US) government contributions to ASPI were up more than 30 times on the previous year.
Weapons makers front and centre
ASPI’s loyal supporters in the military industrial complex once again stepped up. Lockheed Martin, a continuous sponsor since 2004, provided $25,000, while its US counterpart Northrop Grumman paid $67,500.
The French did their part sending over $63,300 from Thales and Naval Group.
Thales was awarded the contract to supply the Australian Army with Hawkei off-road light military vehicles in circumstances seriously questioned by the Australian National Audit Office. Completely ignoring that controversy, in September ASPI produced a report praising the Hawkei’s capabilities.
Former Defence Minister Dr Brendan Nelson, a paid advisor to the Thales Group from 2015 until December 2019, was appointed to the ASPI Council earlier this year.
Majority French-government owned Naval Group won the contract for Australia’s controversial $80 billion future submarine project.
In February 2016, ASPI’s executive director Peter Jennings wrote a glowing opinion piece on the Naval Group submarines under the headline “Vive Australia’s choice of a French submarine”.
Two months earlier the French government bestowed France’s highest national decoration, The National Order of Légion d’Honneur, on Jennings.
Annual report tabled late
The publication of ASPI’s annual report – more than a month late – and its late tabling in the Senate by Defence Minister Linda Reynolds ensured ASPI’s finances could not be scrutinized by the Senate Estimates Committee, which investigates how government agencies spend public money.
While the front end focused on the supposed gloomy news that ASPI’s core Defence Department funding had dropped to an all-time low of just 34% of total revenue, the reality is that the federal government is lining ASPI’s coffers at an alarmingly increasing rate, handing it a record number of contracts over the past financial year.
Defence Minister Linda Reynolds, who had a stint working with giant weapons maker Raytheon and co-founded the WA Defence Industry Council before entering politics, moved into her portfolio 18 months ago. In that time ASPI has filed two sets of annual accounts that show total government funding has risen more than 50%, from just over $5 million to $7.6 million.
Moreover, under Minister Linda Reynolds the total value of government contracts awarded to ASPI has leapt by 126% over the past year.
In their preface to the annual report Jennings and his Chairman retired Army chief Kenneth Gillespie, wrote, “We would like to thank the Minister for Defence, Senator the Hon Linda Reynolds CSC, for her continuing close personal engagement and support.”
That close personal engagement between the Defence Minister and ASPI’s executive director extends back two decades when both were chiefs of staffers to ministers in the Howard government.
Tracking its own finances
While ASPI’s financial statements are audited by the Australian National Audit Office, ASPI is not required to provide a detailed breakdown of its income and expenditure.
ASPI’s audit committee comprises three people with an independent chair. Its members are ASPI Council member Air Vice Marshall (Ret’d) Margaret Staib, and Geoff Brown, chief audit executive of the Department of Defence. The chair is Kate Freebody, a director of accounting consultancy FreebodyCogent Pty. Ltd., whose major client appears to be the Department of Defence. FreebodyCogent does not have a website or any published phone numbers or contact details.
According to Department of Finance records, this year her company was awarded $5.86 million in management advisory contracts with the Defence Department.
Zero disclosure on ASPI’s financial beneficiaries
One key area where ASPI has zero transparency is the money it spends commissioning reports and hiring outside people, including academics and journalists.
Last financial year it spent $2,940,454 on contractors and suppliers, yet there is no public disclosure on who it hired and what they were paid. These contributors were paid from funds mostly derived from Australian taxpayers and foreign governments.
One ASPI contributor is federal MP Dave Sharma, who produced a report for ASPI while running as a Liberal candidate for the seat of Wentworth in the 2019 election.
ASPI has 18 Visiting Fellows who, it says, “produce a range of written analyses, contribute to ASPI program areas and provide mentoring for staff”.
Among them are ABC journalist Stan Grant; former journalist and ASIO adviser John Garnaut; former deputy NSW Police Commissioner Nick Kaldas; former federal Labor politicians Stephen Loosley and David Feeney; and former Australian Signals Directorate chief Simeon Gilding.
In August last year the Australian Signals Directorate, the nation’s international spy agency, paid the think tank $99,354.85—an amount ASPI did not report anywhere.
Marcus Reubenstein is an independent journalist with more than twenty-five years of media experience, having previously been a staffer with a federal Liberal Party senator from 1992 to 1994. He spent five years at Seven News in Sydney and seven years at SBS World News where he was a senior correspondent. As a print journalist he has contributed to most of Australia’s major news outlets. Internationally he has worked on assignments for CNN, Eurosport and the Olympic Games Broadcasting Service. He is the founder and editor of Asian business new website, APAC Business Review.
Comments
18 responses to “Agents of foreign influence. What about the Australian Strategic Policy Institute?”
Fantastic research for an incredible story. It’s an absolute classic. The personal and financial webs are mind boggling. I knew they were ‘bad’ but I’d no idea how bad. Many thanks Marcus.
ASPI is a mass conflicts… one of the ‘funny’ things I picked up was that the ‘internal’ audit chair Kate Freebody has no office, she appears to work out of a farmhouse 50km north of Canberra and picked up about $12 million in commonwealth “management advisory” contracts since 2018. It’s no accident that ASPI picks a business owner with such ‘opaque credentials’ to oversee its internal audits.
Is “accountability” or “transparency” the issue with ASPI? Surely it is a matter of a foreign agent concocting security deceptions about certain countries to justify diverting the finances of the citizenry away from healthcare, education and other critical services and into armament and ordinance and to ultimately destroy socialism. Why else would hatefilled violent Western governments and armament corporatiions fund ASPI. The same goes for its inbred siblings both here and overseas, including the Australian Institute for International Affairs, UKs Freedom House, and the US Council on Foreign Relations.
Thanks Stephen, ASPI is an interesting case study – for one thing it employs a multitude of CCP-like methods in running itself (media stooges, conflicted board members, 20-something analysts who are Twitter trolls, constantly ‘re-editing’ its own Wikipedia page). However, they are careful to do just enough so they operate within their legislative guidelines, not accountable & not transparent BUT not operating outside their very broad and very generous commonwealth remit.
I first came across ASPI about a year ago when I discovered that a report they had compiled called ‘Uighurs for Sale’ was being used in Germany to shame the Volkswagen corporation to stop using Chinese companies to manufacture spare parts, because the Chinese companies were using ‘slave labour’ in the form of re-educated Uighur workers working for little or no wages. I read the report, which included strong assertions about Uighurs being forced to work ‘probably against their will’ and being paid a pittance, but the report cited no hard evidence for its claims.
Subsequently I read reports from Beijing that confirmed that retrained Uighurs were indeed working in these companies but denied they were being paid less than other Chinese workers. Next, I came across reports alleging that the various elements of the US military industrial complex who were helping fund ASPI were themselves using ‘slave’ labour in the form of workers from the US private prison system, who were paid as little as 25 cents an hour.
The ASPI has long claimed it is an independent NGO, which it certainly isnt, but the irony that it is writing reports accusing China of using ‘slave’ labour, while itself is funded by corporations who do use slave labour, is somewhat breathtaking.
A huge irony that at the same time, Australians are being regaled with various legislation around interference and foreign influence – legislation which wouldn’t look out of place in current day Poland or Hungary etc. The CCP States are out of practice in using more subtle and covert means to influence the public conversation, such that it is. Positivey clumsy in comparison.
Brilliant.
I’ve done a bit of research on the Uyghur labour situation in China. Once again, ASPI is right in saying Uyghur and other Xinjiang minorities are sent to other parts of China to work – however there is no evidence to support the claim it is mass forced labour. And the Chinese-born analyst who wrote that report (Vicky Xu) knows it. They’ve identified 80,000 workers which sounds a lot… FoxConn which makes iPhone’s in SE-China has 1 million employees.
These Xinjiang workers are getting paid, the ones who are not have fallen victim to predatory labour hire agents who act pretty much the same as SE-Asian agents who send domestic workers and labourers to the Middle East. Thou, from my travels to China in the past five or so years, the mid-level official corruption that supports such practises has been snuffed out.
Xi Jinping is a hard-line authoritarian but unlike our ‘never get off the ground’ federal ICAC, China’s leadership can mandate anti-corruption laws in a matter of weeks (technically same say, though they had to ease them in so all the key corrupt CCP officials could cover their tracks).
I’ve seen reports from three independent spot labour audits (2x German 1x UK) on companies ASPI allege use forced labour – in those case they found Xinjiang workers were getting paid 30% above (equivalent) award rates. It is very common for workers from poor Chinese provinces to move across China and work in factories – ASPI cherry-picks facts out of public reports on these programs and calls it slave labour!
Thank you, Marcus. It looks like our Australian defence and foreign establishments have infestations that will be hard to remove. But perhaps this is how many Australians like it. Generating fear and loathing of China and anything Chinese wins juicy contracts and more. And almost guaranteed to win those critical marginal seats!!
Agreed, China seems too willing to start arguments which benefit nobody other than the China hawks in the security establishment. 90% of the Chinese diaspora feel as though they are being made to choose between China and Australia – so they are confused. The business community takes the approach of ‘that export sector is gone, let’s hope we aren’t next’ and keep their mouths shut. And security establishment treats every Chinese-Australian who immigrated from mainland as a ‘suspect’.
You’re right, in twelve months time the Libs (mainly) in the electorates with high Chinese populations will be asking for Chinese-Aus votes and donations.
The Trump-ets Voluntary do indeed burley the waters on these issues. As I mentioned https://publish.pearlsandirritations.com/cui-bono-from-the-decline-in-australia-china-relations/ there is only one beneficiary in all of this to do, and however much the PM now tries to be a mugwump, he has been well and truly grabbed by the Trumpets in Oz (aka ASPI) and they won’t let go.
ASPI claims in its charter to be ‘independent and non-partisan’. Reports and press releases from Jennings, Shoebridge, et al are clearly political. Who oversees these think tanks? To whom are they accountable?
Also, Amazon is a sponsor of ASPI and is conflicted with its disclosure requirements to its client the CIA.
It is in fact non-partisan, in so far as it doesn’t favour Labor over LNP. However, it is very ideological – it is a support group and cheerleading squad for the foreign policy and military hardliners. I doubt sponsors tell them what to do, simply because it is a given ASPI will always act in the interests of its benefactors. Jennings (and now with his old mate Linda Reynolds controlling the purse strings) has completely transformed it into a commercialised propaganda outfit.
Thanks Marcus – I hope you continue to expose it.
Thanks John, Will do my best!
Marcus I would love to know your opinion on these questions:
Are the US and UK the two most evil countries on the planet?
Have the UK and US killed more of humanity than any other country on the planet?
Should not Australia publicly and profoundly cut out all ties with these two rogue states?
Hi Jack, I’m not that negative on UK and US. The former has given us institutions which have served our democracy pretty well, the latter has exposed us to some positives in terms of our social and economic development. My great comfort in America has always come from the fact that the most deep and thoughtful critics come from within. Can’t remember who it was but a US comedian in the 1990s whose material was all anti-US government was asked, “If you hate our government so much why not leave America?” he replied, “I would expect for the fact I don’t want to become a victim of US foreign policy!”
That said – UK and US claim the moral high ground yet through colonialism and constant military excursions and nearly a century of overt/covert programs of regime change, they have appalling records on human rights. You’re contention is right, they have zero moral authority.
What’s more the Anglo/European native English speaking peoples (US, UK, Aus, Can, NZ) represent less than 5 percent of the global population – it kind of smacks of racism that we should be dictating to the rest of the world how they should be governed.
Twice we have stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the Americans staring down the “threat” of communism in Asia. Four million Korean and Vietnamese civilians were killed in those follies. That was am enormous human tragedy and it seems madness that we would again look to the military/security establishment to guide our nation on dealing with communist China.
I believe Australia needs a simple, yet profound, shift in thinking. (1) Geographically we are part of Asia and (2) the interests of the US (and to a lesser extent UK) do not automatically align with our own.
That’s a wonderfully erudite answer – thank you Sir. I’ll read that a few times and absorb. I am glad there are people like you in the media to follow and take my tips from. Unfortunately too many people take their cues from the less articulate characters on Sky and in the Murdoch organisation generally.