FBI gives Australia inside running on China tactics

AFP chief commissioner Reece Kershaw says the agency needs more Mandarin speakers to work on foreign inference cases

Australian Federal Police chief commissioner Reece Kershaw in his office in Canberra. Picture: Sean Davey.

Australian Federal Police chief commissioner Reece Kershaw says the agency needs more Mandarin speakers to work on foreign inference cases and will recruit language graduates and Australian-Chinese community members to tackle the “new and complex” threat.

A year after he was sworn into the job, Mr Kershaw has also ­revealed he sought help last year from the United States Federal Bureau of Investigations on how the AFP could respond to foreign interference in Australian institutions. He said the FBI prepared detailed training materials for its Australian counterpart to help it investigate crimes under foreign interference laws passed in June 2018. He said a key insight from the FBI, which has ramped up prosecutions of US citizens and foreign agents working covertly for Beijing, was to “understand your opponent”.

“We are dealing with people who are highly trained and highly skilled,” Mr Kershaw said. “The challenge in that crime type is how do you cut across from intelligence to evidence. It’s great to know something and suspect something, but you have to prove it.”

The agency now has 65 investigators in its foreign interference team, which works closely with ASIO, “and that will grow over time”, Mr Kershaw said.

He said there were “not enough” Mandarin speakers in the AFP to deal with the growing foreign interference threat — a situation he hoped to reverse in a new recruitment drive. “It is something that we are focusing on, as far as far as getting that broad language (skill set) and identifying what those gaps are,” Mr Kershaw said.

Australia’s security agencies have long struggled to recruit sufficient numbers of Mandarin speakers of non-Chinese heritage, who are more easily vetted for classified work, making it much harder to crack foreign interference cases. It’s understood the AFP will also target Arabic speakers to work on counter-terrorism cases as part of a wider push to ensure the agency taps into the skills of ­diaspora communities.

“We’ve got to be as diverse as the Australian community, but currently we’re not,” he said.

Since Mr Kershaw took charge, the AFP has disrupted two potential terrorist attacks — one by an alleged Islamist extremist and another inspired by extreme right-wing ideology. Ten people were charged as a result of six joint counter-terrorism operations.

Mr Kershaw said a new Sensitive Investigations Oversight Board was now helping investigators to balance the requirement to prevent an attack with the need to gather evidence to prosecute.

The AFP is also pursuing a surge in online child exploitation cases, amid a jump in reports of ­alleged abuse to 21,000 in 2019-20, compared to 14,000 the previous year.

Data suggests the amount of child abuse material being shared on the dark web is increasing, with AFP officers seeing sites crash due to the increase volume of traffic.

The AFP raided NSW state Labor MP Shaoquett Moselmane and his part-time staffer John Zhang in June in a joint investigation with ASIO over allegations of foreign interference by the Chinese Communist Party.

It’s alleged Mr Zhang, who ­attended a CCP propaganda training course in 2013, sought to ­improperly influence Mr Moselmane, concealing from his boss that he and others were collaborating with the Chinese state.

The raids were the first use of June 2018 national security laws introduced by Malcolm Turnbull targeting CCP interference in Australian institutions.

Mr Kershaw said the AFP was currently investigating “more than one” additional foreign interference case, but declined to elaborate.