James Campbell: Mark Dreyfus is playing a risky game on China

SOME Labor MPs fear Mark Dreyfus’s attitude to proposed foreign interference laws could threaten Bill Shorten’s leadership, writes James Campbell.

LAST week, West Australian MP Andrew Hastie used parliamentary privilege to name the Chinese-Australian billionaire Dr Chau Chak Wing as CC-3, the name given to a man accused in US court documents of being a co-conspirator in the bribery of the late United Nations president John Ashe.

Hastie claimed his information had been given to him on a recent trip to the United States. The accusation is not new: it was first aired by the ABC in a Four Corners report last June that is now the subject of defamation proceedings.

To say the government’s leadership was unimpressed with the former SAS captain’s speech would be an understatement.

Ministers were hoping the first week back in parliament after a well-received Budget would be spent talking about the well-received Budget, not prodding the festering wound that is Sino-Australian relations.

Which is not to say there is no support in principle for his use of parliamentary privilege from both Labor and Liberal MPs.

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Australian Shadow attorney-general Mark Dreyfus. Picture: AAP

The government members just wished he had chosen another time to do it, though, naturally, some wondered whether Hastie was being deliberately unhelpful given his closeness to former prime minister Tony Abbott.

The instinct of some Labor MPs was to ignore Hastie’s intervention.

They recognise that, politically, the last thing Labor wants to be doing after the destruction of Sam Dastyari is revisiting the issue of Chinese donors, especially as the party has yet to declare its position on the government’s Bill designed to limit foreign — in other words Chinese — influence on Australia’s politics, a Bill which just happens to be currently before the Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security whose chairman is none other than Andrew Hastie.

This cautious approach was not shared, however, by the Shadow attorney-general, Mark Dreyfus — or Mark Dreyfus, QC, MP — as Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull always delights in calling him whenever he speaks of him in parliament.

Dreyfus, as his title suggests, was once a barrister and has the facile way with words that comes naturally to that profession. The morning after Hastie’s speech, he was up and about on Radio National at his most pompous.

“It’s not something that I can recall ever having occurred from any previous chair of the Intelligence Committee,” he hurrumphed about reports Hastie had not sought permission from US agencies or warned them that he proposed to use the information they had given him.

Dr Chau Chak Wing. Picture: Sahlan Hayes

“I’ve been on trips as a member of the Intelligence Committee and as attorney-general, and obtained information from briefings from the FBI, the CIA, the NSA in the United States or their like agencies in the United Kingdom … it’s always in confidence and, speaking for myself, I wouldn’t have dreamed ever of using information that I’d obtained in that manner.”

As it happens, the reports were false. As Peter Hartcher reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, not only had Hastie’s information not come from the FBI or any federal agency, Hastie had told the Americans he planned to make it public.

NOR was there anything to Dreyfus’ portentous claim that “when someone in the position of the Chair of the Joint Intelligence and Security Committee of the Australian parliament uses publicly information obtained from US agencies, that is going to raise concerns and potentially leads to some loss of confidence in our ally in the way in which it shares information with us”.

In fact, the Americans couldn’t have cared less, as they went out of their way to make clear.

“The bottom line is that we have lost no confidence in our ability to work with the parliament, or with Mr Hastie as chair of the parliamentary committee,” US embassy’s charge d’affairs James Carouso told Hartcher.

West Australian MP Andrew Hastie. Picture: AAP

As for Dreyfus’ claim that he would never use information gained from confidential briefings from overseas agencies, that may be so; but it is not clear if he has the same scruples when it comes to information obtained in Australia.

In 2016, the then chair of the committee, Michael Sukkar, wrote to Dreyfus accusing him of “inappropriate disclosure of correspondence provided to the PJCIS, without prior discussion or agreement of the committee”.

At the time the committee was considering changes to Australia’s terrorism laws and according to Sukkar’s letter, Dreyfus had “repeatedly attempted to delay the PJCIS report” on the proposed Bill.

Sukkar is a Liberal of course, so you might choose to take his complaint with the grain of salt.

It is strange, however, that the complaint from several furious Labor MPs I have spoken to in recent days is that Dreyfus has been playing a similar game in the committee with the proposed foreign interference laws. Indeed, according to one MP familiar with the matter, his obstructionist behaviour has “just about destroyed the whole committee”.

The MP was referring to the prospect of the government simply walking away from negotiating with Labor on the legislation which, as this MP pointed out, had the “serious potential” to put Bill Shorten’s leadership at risk: “Can you imagine going to these by-elections with the government hammering us on foreign interference?”

From a Labor point of view, it doesn’t bear thinking about.

James Campbell is national politics editor

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