Attorney-General’s department says foreign influence scheme not fit for China

The Attorney-General’s department has advised the Albanese government to consider a ‘tiered system’ system to focus on ‘opaque’ links to high-risk governments such as China.

Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus. Picture: Getty Images

The Attorney-General’s department has advised the Albanese government to consider a “tiered system” system to focus the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme on “opaque” links to high-risk governments such as China and called for powers to allow Canberra to publicly issue “infringement notices”.

Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus on Monday declined to confirm whether the Sydney-based Australia China Economics Trade and Culture Association was under investigation for not registering on the transparency scheme, following an investigation by The Australian that revealed financial links to Chinese businessman Zhuo Xinrong.

ACETCA executive chairman Ven Tan did not answer calls on Monday.

The fresh concerns about the role of China’s foreign influence organisations in Australia come at a delicate time for the Albanese government as it attempts to get Beijing to end its black-listing of a sweep of our exports and to release two imprisoned Australians.

Sources in Canberra said the government was aware of the scheme’s problems but was worried about enraging China. Government members are frustrated by criticism by the opposition, noting the scheme was created by the Turnbull government in 2018.

“The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security is now conducting a detailed inquiry into its effectiveness and will report to the government,” a spokesman for the Attorney-General told The Australian in a terse statement.

“The A-G will carefully consider any recommendations.”

Katherine Mansted, a Senior Fellow at the ANU National Security College, said there needed to be a much more active conversation about this issue.

“The main stakeholder in this scheme is the Australian public,” said Ms Mansted, who has urged the government to create an independent statutory officer who could lead public engagement on foreign influence, as well as oversee the transparency scheme.

“Silence and reluctance to talk about the register is unhelpful. It reinforces the idea that the register is a naughty list.

What the register is, and always has been, is a tool of transparency … foreign influence is not always unwelcome.”

Mr Dreyfus’s department was much franker in its recent submission to the inquiry, outlining the difficulty in making the scheme work. It said the challenges had only become harder as strategic competition between the US and China had become “more intensified and public”.

Canberra has struggled with compliance from groups connected to countries with “high degrees of government control and low levels of transparency”, such as China.

The Attorney-General’s Department said it was considering a proposal to “abandon its country-agnostic approach” and adopt a “tiered model” that would focus resources on high-risk countries.

It also called for more enforcement options: “Some options to strengthen enforcement could include a power for the secretary to name entities the department considers have registration obligations but who refuse to register, or a power to issue infringement notices.”

The opposition called for an “urgent overhaul” of the scheme following revelations Mr Zhuo, a Chinese fisheries magnate sanctioned by the US government for human right abuses, is a long-time patron of the influential ACETCA.

Opposition home affairs spokesman James Paterson said Mr Zhuo’s ACETCA links underscored how the legislation was “failing to provide timely information to the public about groups who should be registered”.

“We must reform the legislation to make enforcement more straightforward and the Attorney-General’s Department should put more resources into the team with a new commitment to ensuring compliance,” he said.

“If it takes years to catch up to new front groups, we will always lag behind those seeking to covertly influence our democracy.”

ACETCA was named in a February parliamentary review into the effectiveness of the 2018 Foreign Intelligence Transparency Scheme as the likely successor to the scandal-tainted Australian Council for the Promotion of Peaceful Reunification of China – previously the Chinese Communist Party’s main influence arm in Sydney.

ACPPRC was listed in January by the federal Attorney-General’s office as a foreign government-related entity, five years after the foreign influence scheme was created.

Jennifer Hsu, who has led a three year long research project at the Lowy Institute into Australia’s Chinese heritage population, said the distinction between influence and interference was poorly understood in the community.

“Chinese Australians don’t know what the register is meant to do,” Dr Hsu told The Australian.

She said the problem was compounded by “low levels of trust towards the government around these issues”, which was made worse by many community members‘ experience of the Chinese government.

Mr Zhuo — a permanent honorary chairman and major donor to the Sydney-based group since 2014 — was declared a Specially Designated National last December by the US government under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act which targets perpetrators of serious human rights abuse and corruption around the world.

His Pingtan Marine Enterprise Ltd and eight affiliated companies were also sanctioned by the US Treasury Office which noted that vessels belonging to Pingtan and its subsidiaries “have been involved in serious human rights abuse and implicated in IUU fishing and other illegal activity in Indonesia, East Timor, and Ecuador”.