Huang Xiangmo and Dastyari: more than a soap opera

It may look like the ALP senator has been co-starring in a farce, but appearances can be deceptive. He’s not out of the woods yet.

Sam Dastyari in the senate chamber. Picture: Gary Ramage

Is he a fool? A naughty boy? A comedy genius? Or is he a sly politician trying desperately to save his career? Perhaps NSW Labor senator Sam Dastyari is a combination of all these things.

On the face of it, Dastyari’s adventures over the past 14 months would make an entertaining soap opera with some offbeat humour in the style of Peter Sellers.

Dastyari stars in this farce as a naive, accident-prone politician who stumbles into a rich Chinese businessman, Huang Xiangmo, at a gathering in Sydney. A slapstick routine ensues between them, as Huang speaks little or no English and Dastyari speaks no Mandarin.

Out of the blue, money rains from the function room ceiling. Huang agrees to donate hundreds of thousands of dollars to Dastyari’s party, pay some of his personal bills, and cover the costs of a trip to Beijing. Dastyari tells colleagues Huang is so nice, he never asks for anything in return.

One day, Dastyari is accidentally standing next to Huang on a podium with the Australian flag and coat of arms behind them.

Words tumble from the senator’s lips that would later “shock” him, when it is confirmed beyond doubt that he offered support for Beijing’s maritime grab in the South China Sea.

Ever-forgiving party leader Bill Shorten prefers to sin-bin Dastyari for a temporary spell rather than opt for a harsher penalty when it is first reported in September last year that the senator’s public comments in June may have contradicted Labor’s foreign policy.

During his temporary banishment from the political hurly burly, Dastyari occupies his time by penning an amusingly titled memoir, One Halal of a Story. He also posts a series of quirky homemade videos on social media attacking Sydney property prices and the management of the Fairfax Media company. His props include a dilapidated house in the city’s west, a set of miniature toy ponies and his own children.

Just as his career seems back on track after 14 months, Shorten sin-bins Dastyari again this week when an audio recording pops out of nowhere. The tape is a remarkable aid to amnesia. It shows Dastyari’s podium comments about China were not “mumbled”, not “a very garbled answer”, and not “misquoted” by Australian journalists, as he claimed when they were first reported.

On the contrary, the remarks are clearly scripted. Speaking at length, Dastyari is heard saying the “Chinese integrity of its borders is a matter for China”. Australia, he says, should respect “several thousand years of history, thousands of years of history, where it is and isn’t our place to be involved”.

Dastyari says the tape shocks him because it does not match his recollection of events.

Another startling revelation emerges this week: it turns out Dastyari visited Huang’s mansion in October last year, a fortnight after Shorten had demoted him for the first transgression. When he arrives at Huang’s door, Dastyari makes an unusual request. He tells Huang that they should leave their mobile phones inside and speak outside so that intelligence agency eavesdroppers cannot hear him say, “it is not appropriate that we have future contact”.

There could be more of this soap opera to run. At this point, Dastyari is striving to downplay the significance of his past relationship with Huang. He admits the behaviour that led Shorten to sack him from Labor leadership positions not once but twice is not without fault. But it serves Dastyari’s interests to trivialise it. His latest explanation of what happened seems little different to the scenario above. It casts him mainly as a bumbling innocent.

The alternative scenario, which Dastyari rejects, is a clear career-ender, as very serious allegations are thrown his way. The most serious, even if it was not used by Shorten to justify Dastyari’s second demotion, is based on this week’s other key revelation that the Labor senator’s actions were tantamount to giving Huang counter-surveillance advice.

Dastyari allegedly tipped off Huang that intelligence agencies might be using available technology to activate his mobile phone as a listening device even when it was switched off.

Dastyari does not deny their meeting in the grounds of Huang’s northside Sydney mansion occurred in October last year. Nor does he specifically deny telling Huang to leave his mobile inside.

ASIO had only recently briefed senior government and opposition leaders that Huang was someone of national security interest because of his connections to China’s Communist Party. Fairfax reported this week that Dastyari knew at the time of his northside mansion rendezvous about security concerns related to Huang from back channels in Shorten’s office.

The Labor senator insists he has “never been provided with intelligence information by any Australian security agency ever”, “never passed on intelligence information”, and “never been in the possession of any”.

Malcolm Turnbull’s reaction to news of the mobile phone incident was blunt, claiming the Labor senator had “made it abundantly clear” that his first allegiance was not to Australia. “Whose side is Sam Dastyari on?” he asked. “We expect Australian senators to be on Australia’s side, not assisting foreign governments.”

Much more was now known, Turnbull said, after Dastyari had taken money to pay his personal debts from a foreign national who was “very very close indeed” to the Chinese government. “We learn — and he has not denied it — that he has been providing counter-surveillance advice to that foreign national in order, presumably, so that what he assumed were the operations of Australia’s security agencies could be frustrated. Sam Dastyari should get out of the senate, full stop. That’s his duty.”

Such a direct challenge to an elected politician’s loyalty to his country is rare, and carries grave implications if it were true.

Peter Jennings, executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, has been quoted as saying: “That’s about as serious as it gets. This has to be investigated in a very public way.”

Memories may be short these days, indeed it seems a tape was necessary to cure Dastyari of his unfortunate amnesia about events of just last year. Back in 1983, the Hawke government treated the suspected compromising of ALP figure David Combe very seriously when it ordered ASIO to use “all appropriate means” of surveillance in the belief he was the target of Valery Ivanov, a KGB operative based in Canberra.

Combe was a former ALP national secretary and then lobbyist with excellent party connections. Hawke’s cabinet agreed to expel Ivanov from the country after receiving information he been “cultivating a relationship with an Australian citizen (Combe) which, at Ivanov’s initiative, is now moving into a clandestine phase”.

The Hope royal commission into Australia’s security and intelligence agencies subsequently concluded Combe was targeted by the Soviets, although it could find no evidence that breaches of national security occurred.

Shorten this week expressed his frustration over Dastyari’s exposed past “mischaracterisation” of comments about Beijing’s maritime claims on the South China Sea — in contravention of Labor’s foreign policy and a recent decision by an international tribunal in The Hague. On that point, Shorten believed he had been misled by Dastyari. He said: “I am deeply disappointed with Senator Dastyari, as leader of the Labor Party, that he has put me in a position where I have to sack him again, and the point about this is that I think he will know his colleagues are deeply, deeply frustrated with his very poor judgment.”

But Shorten did not go the extra step. He refused to accept any accusation of disloyalty by Dastyari, branding it “rubbish”. He says he accepted Dastyari’s word that he never possessed or disclosed any classified information.

Dastyari’s relationship with Huang is not a re-run of the Combe-Ivanov affair, at least not yet, even if there could be some similarities. Shorten has given Dastyari a “last chance” and made clear “he has a long, long journey to rebuild trust”. If Dastyari survives, promotion to the frontbench or any other leadership position in the party would seem out of the question during the next term of government.

The test for Dastyari is to stay out of trouble. The risk that he could court more difficulties over his relationship with Huang is why the explanation he was forced to give to the Senate about his behaviour on Thursday was so sparse. Lying in parliament is a sackable offence. It would most definitely be the end if the facts now did not match his recollections.

Still, Dastyari’s statement to the Senate does carry some risks. He said it was not uncommon at large community functions for community leaders to be present.

The difficulty with this proposition is that few community leaders are, like Huang, a billionaire property developer close to Beijing and willing to personally donate extraordinary sums. Dastyari is almost certainly downplaying their relationship: he regarded Huang as a donor “whale” Labor could repeatedly approach for funding, and he personally cultivated him. If Huang was such an undemanding contributor as Dastyari seemed to suggest in the past, why did he withdraw a $400,000 ALP donation around the time of the podium event with Dastyari in June last year after then Victorian ALP senator Stephen Conroy said a future Labor government would authorise the Australian navy to conduct freedom-of-navigation exercises in the South China Sea?

In his Senate statement, Dastyari said he wanted to tell Huang personally, after the events of last year, that he did not think it was appropriate to have future contact. Setting aside that their meeting at Huang’s mansion is evidence enough of their closeness, why did Dastyari need to tell Huang to leave his mobile phone inside? Surely it would not have mattered to Dastyari if ASIO was listening.

Dastyari rejected any assertion that he leaked intelligence to Huang, or was provided any by an Australian security agency, or that he possessed any. His statement does not rule out that he knew from Labor back channels about the surveillance of Huang.

Dastyari claims he included Huang in last year’s press conference to help attract coverage from Chinese media outlets, and that it was “standard practice” for political parties when engaging with ethnic communities. It is not standard practice to blurt out support for Chinese government policy at odds with one’s party when standing next to a big party donor who heads several organisations at one with Beijing’s political objectives.

Dastyari said he had never denied contradicting Labor policy. This is not quite true. He originally suggested he was misquoted after a garbled, mumbled answer.

Dastyari said his “characterisation” of last year’s press conference in Huang’s company was called into question, and the release of the tape “shocked” him as it did not match his recollection of events. Was it more that the surfacing of an audiotape shocked him, or that it contained something he preferred not to believe?

Shorten is standing by Dastyari for now. He has a record of dropping people who cease to be useful or don’t produce what he wants.

Labor insiders say Dastyari remains more valuable to keep onside because he is a direct link to the NSW Labor Party right faction from which Shorten draws necessary numbers — enough to stare down possible leadership contenders such as Anthony Albanese or Chris Bowen.

Some influential Labor figures say it is “time the Dastyari soap opera was over”.

They also believe the weakness of relying on the damaged senator is that the NSW Labor right would dump Shorten if its own survival was at stake, and if the party was guaranteed an election win with another leader.