Labor’s Tanya Plibersek has called for a shake-up of political donation laws, including the introduction of real-time disclosures, to curb the potential for foreign influence after revelations that the Chinese government attempted to fund an agent’s run for federal parliament.
The former shadow foreign minister said politicians needed to be more transparent, and to go above and beyond existing disclosure laws to protect Australia’s democracy from manipulation.
On Sunday it was revealed by a Nine/60 Minutes investigation that the Chinese government had approached a Liberal party member, Nick Zhao, and offered him $1m in campaign funds to run for parliament. After Zhao approached Asio to reveal the contact, he was found dead in a Melbourne hotel room.
On Monday night’s Q&A program Plibersek said these kinds of foreign intelligence operations were “something that anybody who participates in public life has to be aware of and be careful of”.
But she did not go so far as saying Chinese influence was “an infection”, as Q&A’s host, Tony Jones, put it.
“Not only should we ban foreign donations, we should have much lower disclosure thresholds for donations, we should have real-time disclosure and spending caps in our elections,” Plibersek said.
“Politicians have to do our part. We have to do better than following the law. We have to be strong and show an example of independence and integrity.
“Our media have a really strong role to play in scrutinising our democratic institutions and any effort of foreign interference.”
The Australian’s foreign editor, Greg Sheridan, said both Labor and Liberal had not been outspoken enough about China’s human rights violations.
On Monday the Guardian and other outlets published hundreds of leaked Chinese government documents obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists that revealed the full scale of the country’s Uighur internment camps.
“Human rights ought to be a perennial strand in that relationship [between Australia and China],” Sheridan said.
In regards to Hong Kong, Sheridan defended the decision of his own paper, the Australian, to refer to protesters as “terrorists” in a piece written by its national chief correspondent, Hedley Thomas.
“I think Hedley Thomas has done an outstanding job in Hong Kong and he represents great courage in the view he’s taken,” he said.
Sheridan said he was previously “heart and soul with the demonstrators” during the first five months of the pro-democracy protests. But they were now “going down a wrong path” by attacking people and property.
“In that [early] period the demonstrators were extremely careful not to ever attack a human being and really not to attack property, not to do any property damage. They’d even clean the streets after themselves.
“In the last month, some demonstrators have done things which are unconscionable. They’ve set alight individual civilians that they disagreed with and tried to burn them to death. They’ve tried to steal a policeman’s revolver, resulting in a shooting incident.”
The panel also heard from Tamar Zandberg, an Israeli politician from the Democratic Union, who said continued Israeli settlements on the West Bank were “one of the biggest obstacles for peace”.
Zandberg, a member of the Knesset, was asked about Donald Trump’s declaration that the settlements were not illegal, which contradicted international law, and the US legal position since 1978.
“The settlements are one of the main reasons why we still don’t have a viable agreement between Israel and the Palestinians that would ensure a two-state solution,” she said.
“Their existence and the fact that they are not evacuated from there is actually against the interests of Israel and Israelis … We should solve this in bilateral talks between Israelis and Palestinians, between two brave leaders deciding to change the course of history towards peace.”
