This week Sharri Markson exposed the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the British MI6 and others for a gormless bunch of gumshoes and naifs.
On Monday, the investigations editor of The Australian told us “the Chinese Communist Party has infiltrated the Australian, British and United States consulates in Shanghai, with a government-run recruitment agency placing advisers into Western embassies for more than a decade”.
Along with reporters Jared Lynch and Remy Varga, Markson had gone through a CCP membership list with the names, jobs, birthdays and ethnicity of 1.95 million of the party’s 92 million members.
“An investigation by The Australian has found that at least 10 consulates in Shanghai have CCP members employed as senior political and government affairs specialists, clerks, economic advisers and executive assistants,” they reported. “Foreign affairs experts warn the employment of CCP members in the consulates, some for up to 16 years, could be part of a “state-sponsored spy ring”, while intelligence officers labelled it a breach of protocol and a risk to national security.” Lots were working in local branches of foreign companies.
The list, dated in 2016, came from a database accessed by unknown activists in Shanghai, and circulated around various dissident groups, before coming to the recently formed Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China in September, whose Australian members are led by Liberal MP Andrew Hastie and Labor senator Kimberley Kitching. No prizes for guessing Markson’s source then. The Australian’s distinguished media partners in this drop were Britain’s Mail on Sunday, Belgium’s De Standaard, and some unnamed Swedish journalists.
The reporters got some of the usual suspects to fulminate, including “Charles Sturt University public ethics academic and China specialist” Clive Hamilton and ASPI head Peter Jennings. Another was the Henry Jackson Society in London, self-appointed defenders of democracy. “It is extraordinary that some countries have persisted in employing locally engaged staff in China when these threats have been clear for some time,” said spokesman Samuel Armstrong.
He said the employment agency sending these staff to foreign missions “looks and smells like a well-organised, state-sponsored spy ring … The Australian government has done a good job at eliminating long-term security risks from China but Foreign Minister (Marise) Payne will need to urgently explain how such a glaring intelligence threat came to be normalised in one of DFAT’s missions.”
As for Britain, one such party plant worked just downstairs from the MI6 floor in its Shanghai consulate. “Anybody walking past her office and up the staircase she could identify as an intelligence officer to pass back to the Chinese Communist Party,” Smith said.
By the time readers got to the end of the report and its follow-ups, they might have noticed some caveats and back-tracking. Former diplomats based in China, such as Kevin Rudd and Geoff Raby, pointed out that diplomatic missions kept locally engaged staff out of protected areas. Employers said they did not ask staff about their political affiliations. And with businessman Chau Chak-wing’s recent defamation successes in Australian courts no doubt in the minds of News Corp lawyers, the article stressed that “there is no evidence that anyone on the party membership list has spied for the Chinese government”. It also acknowledged that “many become members to boost their career prospects”.
After some days, Markson’s bombshell was more like a firework vanishing into smoke, as was her scoop earlier this year about a “Five Eyes dossier” pointing to a Wuhan laboratory as the likely source of the Covid-19 virus. That turned out to be a US State Department collection of press clippings.
Beyond the cringe
Pulled out of the list for special mention was the name of Chen Hong, the professor at Shanghai’s East China Normal University specialising in Australian studies, who had his multiple entry visa cancelled in September after ASIO and federal police conducted raids to break up a suspected foreign interference ring. The listing, editorialised The Australian, “leaves no doubt” about his views.
This was news to Chen. “Through the kind offices of The Australian and some other Australian media outlets, I became a member of the CPC without even knowing it,” he wrote in China’s tabloid Global Times. Actually, he had never been a party member, and had tried to tell this to the newspaper.
The professor suggested that those in Canberra hunting for “reds under the bed” would do better heeding the advice of the Australian literary critic A.A.Phillips, who first talked of an Australian “cultural cringe” in a famous essay for Meanjin in 1950: “”The opposite of the Cringe is not the Strut, but a relaxed erectness of carriage.”
Trading threats
The trade punishment of Australia under Scott Morrison’s government continues to ratchet up, with China effectively confirming an embargo on Australian coal, worth $14 billion a year, that has been in effect already for several months. Lost markets in China are now more than $20 billion a year.
It has led to a certain amount of defiance in the media. Sacked minister and Barnaby Joyce fan Matt Canavan suggested a levy on iron ore sales to China. In the News Corp tabloids Ellen Whinnett reported that the Five Eyes were consulting about how to band together to help out Australia with counter trade sanctions on China, not reporting that Canada is already moving to replace our coal sales.
But doubts are creeping in, even in some unlikely places. In The Australian, under the headline “Do you know what you are doing, PM?”, columnist Katrina Grace Kelly, normally a pro-Coalition attack-dog, said that after the bushfires and coronavirus, Australia needed the trade war with China “like we need a hole in the head”.
“Do you even know what you are doing? That is the question industry leaders would love to ask Scott Morrison and his team. Our political leaders appear inept and the Prime Minister’s angry response this week to an offensive image gave an impression of weakness.”
New man of steel
Not to worry, though. According to her paper’s political editor Dennis Shanahan, the Beijing tweet “has put new steel into the Prime Minister’s spine”.
“One fake image on Twitter has changed the dynamic of the relations between Australia and China, drawn the incoming Biden administration to Scott Morrison, even before the new US president is sworn in, and totally changed the domestic political equation for Anthony Albanese and Labor,” Shanahan intoned.
ASPI’s Peter Jennings had no doubts about how to shape up to China. “Australia has a brilliant opportunity to shape Joe Biden’s strategy for the Indo-Pacific in a way that will secure a major increase in American military power in the region,” he wrote in his weekly column for the same newspaper, going on to say: “We should propose to Biden that elements of the US 1st Fleet should operate out of Stirling in WA and from the Port of Darwin. If Singapore is reluctant to host a land-based headquarters, then we should offer to be the host.”
Brilliant! And next week, Jennings took it further. “Here’s a priority list for Marise Payne’s foreign arrangements taskforce to apply the government’s new veto power: Victoria’s Belt and Road Initiative memorandum of understanding with China; a dozen Confucius Institutes at Australian universities (NSW removed one from its Department of Education last year); and, at last count in 2018, 1741 agreements between Australian and Chinese universities…”
But Payne’s department might need a bit of spine-stiffening too. “We must also hope DFAT’s foreign arrangement taskforce won’t go the way of the Foreign Investment Review Board and conclude that its core task is to facilitate keeping and making foreign agreements as the most important objective. We need a tough national security mindset to look after Australia’s interests. DFAT will need help on that front.”
Which is strange. Wasn’t David Irvine, former ambassador to China and former chief of both ASIS and ASIO, made chairman of the FIRB precisely to bring in a national security eye? But he’s been reported showing signs of weakness lately, forcing Treasurer Josh Frydenberg to countermand his OK for China’s Mengniu to buy out the Lion Dairy from its Japanese owners.
Meanwhile, The Australian’s Ben Packham reported this week on a new Tax Office study showing offshore buyers are snapping up prime agricultural land across the country, with foreign farm ownership surging in the eastern states. North American buyers are leading the charge, Chinese investment is up marginally and UK owners have reduced their holdings by 860,000 hectares.
Pat on head for Hartcher
Only the most dedicated loyalists of Rupert Murdoch will plough through the turgid weekly column of former editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell in The Australian’s Monday media section. It’s usually a predictable rant at the lefties of the ABC and the former Fairfax papers.
This week, however, Mitchell was full of praise for Sydney Morning Herald international and political editor. He had “hit the mark” with his December 1 column, arguing “the evidence reveals that the supposedly mighty regime of strongman Xi Jinping is the one feeling the strain”. This was a column that we singled out for attention as notably strident, so we are rebuked.
Mitchell noted sorrowfully that “Many in the Australian media have always supported the Labor lines of former prime minister Paul Keating and former NSW premier Bob Carr: that our economic future rests with China, which will inevitably become the world’s most powerful nation militarily and economically. It’s been the line from the Department of Foreign Affairs for decades. But events may yet prove it wrong. And we can of course trade with China and preserve our US alliance.”
Pots and kettles
Press gallery stenographers continue to report the pronouncements of our leaders with an admirable lack of irony and comment.
We can only savour the straight reporting of Morrison’s comment on the coal embargo that it would slow China’s progress to the net-zero carbon emissions promised by Xi Jinping for 2060, given the lower calorific value of alternatives. “As a result, that would be a bad outcome for the environment,” Morrison said on Tuesday, only four days after missing out on a speaking slot in the virtual Climate Action Summit because of his government’s failure to set a zero-emission target date.
Then there was Alexander Downer warning business leaders that they risked alienating the public, their customers and their staff if they sided with China against the Morrison government to “push up their share prices”.
The former foreign minister who pulled Australia out of international maritime tribunal jurisdiction and sent ASIS to eavesdrop on the Timorese leaders during sea boundary negotiations told an Asialink forum that “Making the rules-based international system work, making sure that there is an appropriate balance of power in the Indo-Pacific region … making sure that Australia maintains its networks around the world with countries which are its natural friends and allies — all these things are more important than just money.”
Hamish McDonald has been a correspondent in Jakarta, Tokyo, New Delhi and Beijing, and was Regional Editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review in Hong Kong and Foreign Editor of The Sydney Morning Herald. He has won two Walkley Awards for reporting from Asia and was made an Inaugural Fellow of the Australian Institute of International Affairs.
Comments
26 responses to “Media in the Asian Century: Read all about our media expertise on China!”
The first rule in governing is to unite the country when times are bad. Internal issues can be made less problematic if there is fear of an adversary.
Mostly, this is jawjaw, not warwar.
Best not to clutch the pearls too harshly?
The same Alexander Downer who several years ago along with Abbott, encouraged Brexit in UK media, then along with Kevin Andrews and ‘journalist’ Greg Sheridan, visited Hungary at various times, then praising white nativist policies ( as reported by Michael Koziol in SMH and Jeff Sparrow in Crikey Oct ’19)? Seems to be a local and/or global circuit for continuous white nativist political PR?
I am starting to suffer deja vu: Peter Jennings claim, that “Australia has a brilliant opportunity to shape Joe Biden’s strategy for the Indo-Pacific in a way that will secure a major increase in American military power in the region,” is horribly reminiscent of Menzies attempt to keep the Americans engaged in this neck of the woods by encouraging and supporting them in their Vietnam adventure – and didn’t that go well!
Thank you for reminding me of my 1950s English teacher at Wesley College AA Phillip’s, Tosh as we affectionately called him!
Tosh like many of our teachers of that era taught us to think for ourselves. Today we seek refuge in P&I, alarmed at the “reds under the bed” hysteria of the Costello and Murdock controlled press.
But remember who you are dealing with. The CCP is a corrupt oligarchy exploiting its people having adopted state capitalism as its guiding ideology. It has been stealing state property for 30 years and has a greedy ruling class that appears to be challenging the US for the title of chief Imperialist Barbarian of the World. An Eco-socialist Australia will better serve our children and neither Chinese or US pretensions offer anything of value to us in this Climate Emergency.
Mate they have lifted 800 million people out of poverty. During the last decade China’s average real wages adjusted for inflation increased by 8.2 percent annually in the decade, much higher than the global growth rate, according to the ILO, that notorious Stalinist outfit. Average real wages nearly doubled in China between 2008 and 2018. Real average wages have increased by a staggering 9% this year. As you may have noticed under neo-liberal capitalism real wages have either stagnated or fallen in the last twenty years. PRC apparently has a very unusual state capitalist system that increases the real wages and improves the living standards of the working class. Also worker ownership predominates. 90% of Huawei ownership for instance is held by the employees retirement fund. I could go on and recommend you read Xue Maqiao’s classic “China’s Socialist Economy”.
https://archive.org/details/ChinasSocialistEconomy1986
But you seem to be a very determined Tree Trotskyist and good on you for that mate.
Good article!
China is now the number two economy probably very close to the title in the world.
There’s no question about it. They’ve eclipsed Europe, they’ve eclipsed Japan, they’ve eclipsed Russia.
They’re it; they’re the big player. And that has to be understood, or else you’re lost in propaganda junk.
They never were a colonial country, but they were heavily impacted by colonialism. And while we had the upper hand they were largely invisible to the West ,
How things change. The hubris and hypocrisy is at least consistent in Western dialogue!
The reason you do not get a peep out of Opposition Leader is because both Parties, the LNP and Labor thinks alike, not so much as Australia’s economic interest but Australian votes. With rising anti-China sentiments in the community fueled by effect Murdoch propaganda, the China as the enemy has been confirmed and sold to the public. Try and reverse it now and feel the heat domestically. We dug ourselves in the hold and will tak some tie for us to get out. The Opposition & Government take the same path.
The level of ignorance about China, and Australia’s relationship with it, among the media and many politicians, is both shameful and worrying. They write and speak about China as though they actually know something about it. Mostly they are clueless. We can single out Sharri Markson – she is especially clueless – but certainly not alone. The disservice they are all doing to this country is sad. People need to be informed not subjected to rantings by ignorant journos and politicians.
I’d humbly suggest that, with a few notable exceptions, this is true- and the accepted if not promoted norm for most any topic that establishment mass media outlets in Australia report on.
Here we go again! More commies under the bed.
I wonder if foreign nations know how many LNP and ALP members are employed in their embassies in Australia. We all know how dangerous party members are!
If the continuing shit stirring by these right wing media (who seem to have their stories mostly wronged after a few days) it would be utterly hilarious, but they are the real danger to our economic well being.
Thanks, Hamish – for keeping your steely eye on all the toadies to the US (please, Sir, pat-us-on-the-head) who have betrayed our sovereignty – and our trade (farmers, fishers, others) – the markets heading to Canada, the US…while we jump up and down clamouring for support against the supposed bully! One would laugh at the shirt-front posturing if it were not hurting the real workers of this country. Who all merit compensation from those who have led the charge-of-the-white-brigade! Not from the nation – from the property portfolios of those who have led us into this ravine with their jingoistic and racist nonsense.
And not a squeak out of our opposition leader ‘Anthony’. He seems more than content to let China Hawks like Kimberley Kitching lead the conversation rather than come up with any alternative. You’d seriously think with our relationship with China in tatters and the economic impacts escalating day by day he’s have something to say on the issue. But he’s so inept and ineffective – terrified to take on Murdoch, terrified of being wedged on national security that he’s dealt himself out of the conversation completely.
Which begs the question, how infiltrated is Australia and who is pulling the strings. I suspect that what remains unspoken is that the 1975 constitutional crisis is still fresh in politicians minds and their career aspirations.
Kimmy and O’Connors brother, Mick are members of the Harvard Trade Union ‘school’ of CIA infiltration. They send them over for education in trade union development from a country that has the weakest and most corrupt unions in the world. One CFMEU official i know went over. Fair dinkum this bloke failed plasticine at kindy. Mick O’Connor is the “International Liaison” of the Harvard “Alumni”. Our old mate Michael Easson, of religous influence in the ALP fame went over to Harvard. If you want to map the CIA influence in the ALP all roads lead to Harvard. Some of these clowns compromised themselves (no one mentioned above) in the bordellos of Boston and were very co-operative when they got back to Australia. I an writing a book about the Harvard Alumni if anyone is interested.
Insightful! So Harvard is our version of Eton and it’s not even Australian.
Harvard University has no connection whatsoever with the Harvard University Trade Union Program.The trade union facility is situated outside the Harvard campus. Some of the alumni are the Killer in the Kardigan, Barry Unsworth, the appalling Joe Thompson, Ralph Willis, Kathy Jackson and of course Hawkie. His benefactor Abeles was a Trustee along with that great supporter of trade unionism Hugh Morgan. Peer da Silva was another Trustee who was CIA Station chief in Australia in the 1970’s. Four unionists each year with “proven leadership potential” were selected and given return air fares, tuition, accommodation and study materials, and $250 a week walking around money for the duration of the 13-week indoctrination course. When these geniuses ‘graduated” the US government gives each “graduate” a daily allowance for four weeks of travel around the US to “liaise with their US counterparts, solidify friendships and see those principles learned at Harvard in action.” I know a few who went down to New Orleans for the jazz and as i said with the blokes, the bordellos of Boston got a hammering. Anyone who is currently in Australian politics or the trade union movement who has been on one of these junkets should be required to sign up as an agent of a foreign power. Starting with Michael O’Connor and yes I am looking at you Kimmy. She is so pro-American she gushed in the Senate that she named her two dogs Ronnie and Nancy after the Reagans. Literally running dogs of the yanks. A special mention should be made of Tim Harcourt who went when he was “working” for the ACTU. Tim is now an anti-China “economist” and flying high as the “Airport Economist” who puts “Harvard” on his CV. I will declare that i sadly never got a guernsey.
Surely Hawke would have been Harvard’s greatest success.
Yes he became a PM. The current highest serving “graduate” is Brendan O’Connor brother of Mike. Some did kick on. Kathy Jackson rorted about 1.5 million from the hospital cleaners union. Top marks there in union corruption. My personal favorite is the bizarre Michael Costa. Went from Trot organizer in Wollongong to neo-liberal chatterer for Murdoch. Complete nutter.
Looking forward to your book.
Very interested. Wondering if you are drawing the links to those among the pollies (both sides) who go on Israeli junkets, too.
Yes the junket connection. We had a chap in the ALP who went on so many junkets he was called cinnamon. Of course Billy Shorten went on one to two to Occupied Palestine. He said he wanted to connect Australian super funds with smart Israeli investors. Kimberly deserves a special mention going to Occupied Palestine on a junket and just gushing about the investment opportunities. Sometimes words just fail.
Fascinating, was alleged that several Australian MPs and others including Australia’s ‘top demographer’ Dr. Bob Birrell, Bob Carr and Bob Hawke would meet with US Consular officials?
Further, round 2006 ‘population growth’/’high immigration’ media campaigning started, based upon Birrell’s research, Sustainable Population Australia, their patrons Dick Smith and Bob Carr; playing up on an unpublicised change in the definition of NOM net overseas migration but the UNPD in 2006, that statistically spiked the population data (due to increasing temporary churn over, neither fertilty nor permanent migration).
Birrell tried liaising with the CFMEU in helping create some antipathy towards immigrants, work visas etc. based upon his research; think the CFMEU eventually started supporting foreign workers on temp visas.
However, any cursory scratching round of these Oz influencers and ideologues, always led back to the US and white nationalist movement supported by fossil fuels and related, endeavouring to avoid climate/environmental protection policies while promoting libertarian policies indirectly through splitting the centre right through left and/or proponents of a non fossil fuel environmental measures.
Very interesting to simply watch which infamous think tanks and/or related policy outfits in the US and UK, have numerous Australian visitors or connections from the centre and right.
Still, like many, highly suspicious of the Green’s support for Abbott’s trashing of the Labor carbon emissions pricing……
The best documented meeting in the consulate of the empire is documented in the Wikileaks cables regarding Billy Shorten. Billy quotes Martin Luther King Jnr to the embassy and is quoted as boasting that “While National Secretary of the powerful Australian Workers’ Union, he spent time in the United States collaborating with the United Steel Workers’ union; his successor Paul Howes has since carried this relationship forward.”
Under Billy and Howsey’s brilliant leadrship the AWU (the steelworker’s union) has kicked on. They have closed their branch office in Wollongong recently. And Billy almost became a PM.
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09MELBOURNE69_a.html
Albo’s former great mate was Ian MacDonald, Eddies “pet crocodile” as Bob Carr called him. Albo’s evidence in the conspiracy trial was somewhat vague but he remembered the lunch at the Chinese restaurant with Macca. Just wondering if the Murdoch press has some interesting research on Albo? Just asking. Albo’s evidence in Maccas trial is reported here.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-20/anthony-albanese-gives-evidence-at-obeid-macdonald-trial/11984858