Gareth Evans rates foreign influence call ‘a joke’

Gareth Evans says a request from the A-G’s Department to register as a potential agent of foreign influence is a ‘joke’.

Former foreign minister Gareth Evans. Picture: AAP

Former foreign minister Gareth Evans has dismissed as a “joke” an official request from the ­Attorney-General’s Department asking him to register as a potential agent of foreign influence under national security laws.

Professor Evans, who served as Labor foreign minister from 1988 to 1996, received a written request on July 19 asking him to consider his obligations under the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme, which commenced in 2018.

In his July 20 reply to the letter from the Attorney-General’s Department, which was sent by an assistant secretary in the depart­ment’s Integrity and Security Division, he wrote: “I regard this communication as a joke, albeit one in very poor taste, and propose to treat it accordingly.”

His response came as one of the architects of the nation’s foreign influence laws, former prime ministerial adviser Daniel Ward, called for them to be overhauled, saying it was a mistake to make them “country agnostic”.

Mr Ward, a former adviser to Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison, called for a new “tiered model” that would apply a higher level of regulation and scrutiny to “designated” authoritarian countries such as China. He said by casting the net too widely, treating liberal democracies in the same way as authoritarian states, “we wind up regulating a lot of activity that doesn’t have a foreign government as its … puppet­master”.

Professor Evans was informed he might need to register under the scheme because of his position on the Global Advisory Committee of the Jeju Forum for Peace and Prosperity, and because he had undertaken speaking engagements at the forum.

He said in his response that since his time as a cabinet minister, he had been associated with “scores” of international organisations in speaking, writing and occasional advisory roles.

“Every international organisation with which I have been even marginally associated has been devoted, as I have been throughout my many decades of public life, to making our region or the wider world safer and saner,” Professor Evans said.

“Might I suggest to the ­Attorney-General’s Department and those who direct it that if you are genuinely concerned about protecting Australia’s national interests, and the integrity and reputation of our national institutions, you apply your scarce resources … more productively.”

The Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme was described by then prime minister Mr Turnbull on its 2017 introduction into parliament as an attempt to inform the government and public about the “forms and sources of foreign influence in Australia”.

The Jeju Forum is a prominent regional multilateral dialogue aimed at promoting peace in Asia.

Mr Ward, in a new report for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said there should be an explicit acknowledgment in the laws that activities of authoritarian states such as China warrant greater regulation than the activities of liberal democracies.

“In adopting a country-agnostic stance, we blinded ourselves to the very factor that matters most in evaluating and responding to foreign influence – its source country,” he said. “It is time to remove the blindfold. We should recognise this basic truth: foreign influence transparency requirements must be more stringent in relation to some source countries than others.”

The Australian revealed in November 2019 that former prime minister Tony Abbott was also asked to register as a potential agent of foreign influence for ­addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference in Aug­ust that year.

The event’s Australian organiser, Andrew Cooper, whose not-for-profit organisation Liberty­Works co-hosted CPAC in Sydney with the American Conservative Union, was ordered to hand over documents and threatened with jail time.

Professor Evans was informed that under the scheme, former cabinet ministers had a “lifetime obligation to register any activity undertaken ‘on behalf of’ a foreign principal”.