It is also expected foreign companies and organisations will be served with notices requesting them to hand over documents relating to potential agents under their influence. Only two notices have been served on individuals or groups since the scheme came into operation in late 2018, including a Chinese company suspected of engaging in influencing activity which was ordered to hand over documents in recent weeks. Asked in an interview whether more notices would be served in the coming months, Mr Porter said: "The short answer is yes." He said his department was now in the "second round" of administering the scheme and it was "quite conceivable" that some organisations that were trying to influence government policy and democratic processes were not being open about who was directing them. "Now that we have seen, after a year, what entities have registered as either foreign principals or foreign government-related entities, there are other entities … which bare some similarity, on the face of them at least, to entities that have registered," Mr Porter said.

"And where an entity looks like they may have some of the features of a foreign government enterprise, we will be enquiring of them about their structure, their constituent nature, who makes up leadership and director positions inside the entity, so that we can make a determination to our satisfaction that they are either are or not a foreign government enterprise." Loading The Sun-Herald and The Sunday Age can reveal the Australian Council for the Promotion of the Peaceful Reunification of China will be a target of the dedicated new unit. China experts have said the council is the Australian arm of a foreign influence network run by the Chinese Communist Party's United Front Work Department, but the organisation has always denied any link. Another target will be the 13 Confucius Institutes operating at Australian universities, which were last year sent letters by the AG's department alerting them to the introduction of the scheme, according to senior government sources.

The centres are joint ventures between the host universities and Hanban, a Chinese government entity that provides funding, staff and other support. While not naming Confucius institutes directly, Mr Porter said individuals who were employed through a university that connected back to a foreign power could be captured by the scheme if they were "trying to affect democratic outcomes or influence government". "Universities need to obviously be very live themselves to who it is who is seeking to influence their decision-making, their structure, their expenditure, their outcomes, and those people who are seeking to influence universities in that respect universities themselves need to be very mindful about who those people are working on behalf of," he said. Mr Porter said diplomats registered at foreign embassies would unlikely be captured by the scheme, but agents being directed by ambassadors or an embassy could be captured. "The nature of the scheme is where people want to hide the nature of that influence then we have to dig through the layers of secrecy and make the relationships transparent," he said.

"If it's the case that someone is engaged in a registrable activity and they are not directly an ambassador, then it may be that their connection with the government is through what looks like more official channels, but it not known that they are - or they don't self-declare - that they're engaging in activities. "The purpose of this regime running in tandem with espionage and foreign interference laws is to make sure all of the behaviour should be either uninvestigable or knowable to the Australian people. Loading "Behaviours are changing because the costs of engaging in that behaviour has increased." Mr Porter said another key focus of the new unit would be to crack down on foreign agents looking to secretly trying to influence decisions about Australia’s critical infrastructure.