High Court to rule on foreign influence laws

The constitutional validity of the foreign influence scheme will be challenged in the High Court.

LibertyWorks CEO Andrew Cooper in Brisbane. Picture: Glenn Hunt

The constitutional validity of a government crackdown on agents of foreign influence will be challenged in the High Court by a small not-for-profit group whose president was threatened with six months’ imprisonment under new national security laws.

Andrew Cooper, who heads up LibertyWorks — an Australian political think tank which co-hosted last year’s Conservative Political Action Conference in Sydney along with the American Conservative Union — is the driving force behind the test case.

Mr Cooper’s legal team, headed by former Queensland solicitor-general Peter Dunning QC, will argue the government’s Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme Act is partially or entirely invalid under the Constitution.

“I call on (Attorney-General) Christian Porter to repeal or heavily amend the FITS Act,” Mr Cooper told The Australian. “If he won’t fix it then we will attempt to invalidate it. Repealing the law and starting again is the only way to stop unelected bureaucrats from targeting conservatives and libertarians. It’s the only way to protect free speech.”

A Freedom of Information ­request last week revealed that Labor frontbencher Mark Dreyfus sparked the Attorney-­General’s Department’s pursuit of Mr Cooper, as well as former prime minister Tony Abbott, by encouraging officials to examine whether the CPAC event would trigger registration requirements under the 2018 act.

Mr Abbott and Mr Cooper were subsequently asked by the department to register as agents of foreign influence under the new regime, with Mr Cooper ­becoming the first person ordered to hand over documents and threatened with jail.

Both men refused to comply with the department’s request, ­although the secretary of the ­Attorney-General’s Department, Chris Moraitis, wrote to Mr Cooper in December to say it had ceased its probe into him.

The statement of claim being filed on behalf of the plaintiff, LibertyWorks, makes a number of ­arguments against the constitutional validity of the foreign influence scheme, which came into force on December 10, 2018. The Institute of Public Affairs, a free market think tank — which was behind the FOI request revealing Mr Dreyfus’ July 22 meeting with the Attorney-General’s Department in which he discussed the CPAC event — has long argued the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme laws need to be rewritten.

“The Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme is clearly flawed legislation,” said IPA director of communications, Evan Mulholland.

“The bill needs to be completely recast to address the serious issue of foreign interference while defanging meddling ­bureaucrats and opportunistic politicians like Mark Dreyfus who have used it to target their ­enemies.”

Mr Cooper told The Australian that he had been a “victim of draconian power wielded by unelected bureaucrats” at the direction of the Labor Party.

“It’s time to drain the swamp,” he said. “Labor and left-wing ­bureaucrats are colluding and using the FITS legislation to threaten and shut down conservatives and libertarians like me.’’