Asian Angle | Frenzied Australian media fears foreign influence – ‘China’ foreign, not ‘US’ foreign
Stories underscoring Beijing’s sway over Canberra happen to coincide with a joint summit between top officials and their US counterparts
The deluge began with an article in The Guardian raising questions about a research partnership between the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Australia’s national science agency, and China Electronics Group Corporation, a Chinese defence contractor. But the real razzle-dazzle centrepiece was a joint Four Corners-Fairfax scoop, revealing the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) – Australia’s spook agency – had warned both the Australian Labor Party and the Coalition against taking foreign donations from billionaires linked to the Chinese Communist Party. These claims were aired on the ABC, Australia’s national broadcaster, and published in the Sydney Morning Herald.
Four Corners divulged details of an ASIO raid on the apartment of an Australian-Chinese Communist Party-connected socialite, Sheri Yan, who was jailed in 2016 on charges of bribing former United Nations president John Ashe. The ABC reported the raid allegedly uncovered a trove of “highly classified documents containing details of what Western agencies knew about the operations of Chinese intelligence” in the apartment she once shared with her husband, Roger Uren, a former high-level Australian intelligence officer and diplomat.
Questions were also raised about former trade minister Andrew Robb’s decision to take an A$880,000 (HK$4,705,000) consultancy role with Landbridge, a Chinese company that leases the Port of Darwin, shortly after the 2016 federal election.
The Australian authors proving a hit in China
One wonders how the Australian media could come up with so many stories, concurring so neatly, with so much access to sources in the intelligence community and the US administration? Just great investigative journalism?