An hour and a half before Andrew Hastie stood up in the federation chamber of the Australian parliament to share confidential information he’d picked up from the Americans, word reached the spy chief, Duncan Lewis, that something might be afoot.



Hastie, the Western Australian conservative and former SAS officer, now head of one of the most powerful committees in the parliament – the intelligence and security committee – took it upon himself on Tuesday night to use parliamentary privilege to allege the Australian Chinese billionaire Chau Chak Wing as the person funding the bribery of a senior United Nations official, the person identified in court documents as CC3.

Hastie didn’t tell the prime minister or the foreign minister what he was doing, nor did he give a heads up widely to colleagues in the intelligence committee, who found out what was going on when their phones started ringing.

But the Liberal backbencher did manage to give Asio a heads up.

Lewis told a Senate estimates hearing on Thursday night that Hastie “had a discussion” of a speculative nature with a junior officer in the spy agency. About 90 minutes before the speech, the director general was made aware there was “some prospect” of the contribution going ahead.

Hastie didn’t seek authorisation or clearance for his contribution, Lewis said, but he also made it clear Asio didn’t attempt to stop him from speaking, or alert the government about what might be about to unfold.

Curious, isn’t it? A parliamentarian gives a heads up to the spooks, but not to his own prime minister.

The timing was also curious. Julie Bishop had just wrapped up a lengthy bilateral meeting with her Chinese counterpart in Argentina, which was an effort to calm concerns in Beijing about the government’s foreign interference laws.

Andrew Hastie's use of US intelligence over bribery allegation 'a concern', Dreyfus says Read more

It is obvious to anyone watching politics at the moment that the government has been trying over the past few months to defuse a major diplomatic row with Beijing.

The current tensions have an implicit and an explicit trigger. The implicit trigger is the Coalition’s foreign interference laws, which the Chinese believe are directed at them.

The explicit trigger is a public provocation lobbed by Malcolm Turnbull last December in the heat of the Bennelong byelection contest, when he declared the Australian people would “stand up” against meddling – a rhetorical flourish drawing on a historical invocation from Mao Zedong. Language like that fuels the Chinese nationalist narrative of a century of humiliation. The word from diplomatic sources is Beijing wants an apology.

Right now, diplomatically speaking, Australia is in the fridge. Bishop, while maintaining Australia’s line on flash points such as the South China Sea, has been attempting to keep Australia out of the deep freeze.

Hastie’s intervention obviously cut across that effort, catching the Chinese by surprise (something they hate) and also surprising the Americans, who are, according to people in a position to know, less than delighted with the federation chamber frolic.

If you ask people in the government why a member of the government would want to sabotage the government’s own diplomatic efforts, you get a couple of theories.

The first one is obvious. Hastie runs with conservatives hostile to Turnbull and Bishop.

But plenty of people will counsel against settling on the obvious conclusion, pointing to Hastie’s background and personality as the more likely motivations. Hastie isn’t a scheming political apparatchik. He’s a soldier and a patriot who, colleagues say, sees the world in binary and black and white terms (“absolutist”, according to one colleague) – a worldview which could explain the behaviour.

Now, let’s get to the merits of the behaviour. Self-evidently as a journalist I always prefer more information in the public domain than less. It would be pretty bizarre if I argued otherwise – so good one Andrew, the fourth estate salutes you.

But while we can all applaud sunlight and transparency, actions obviously have consequences. Members of the parliament’s intelligence committee have access to a lot of information, and are in the circle of trust when it comes to intelligence sharing with Australia’s major allies.

While the specific information Hastie shared was already in the public domain – at least speculatively, through media reporting that has been denied by Chau and is currently subject to defamation proceedings – the action the Liberal backbencher took was highly consequential.

Hastie has set quite the precedent by taking it upon himself to share confidential information in the public domain which he has obtained as a consequence of his membership of that particular parliamentary committee.

If one chairman can do that, what is to stop other members of the committee deciding to follow his example, invoking the patriotic defence that Hastie invoked on Tuesday night?

While Hastie’s heads up to Asio might have been undertaken with an eye to ensuring the spooks didn’t get a nasty surprise, an effort to mitigate the impact of the precedent, if you like – the example still stands.

It could put a chill in the information sharing, and if it does, that’s problematic. We need the intelligence committee to be well informed by agencies and allies so it can be the informed and clear-eyed watchdog our parliamentary system needs it to be. If information doesn’t flow, the whole system becomes less resilient.

Now, speaking as we were about binary world views, when it comes to managing the Australia/China relationship – the most important foreign policy challenge Australia faces over the next 50 years – binary and cartoonish talk and analysis doesn’t help.

In keeping with the default tribalism of the public square, the conversation about China in Australia sometimes lurches into graphic novel territory, with patriots facing off against the panda huggers.

Binary conversations lack sophistication, and we are going to need both sophistication and wisdom to manage a relationship with a rising power such as China. The bilateral relationship is not now, nor has it ever been, easy. It’s always going to be a bumpy road.

Australia’s security agencies are clearly concerned about the way China attempts to exercise power and gain leverage, both in this country and in our sphere of influence within the region. China’s influence plays are different from the methodologies deployed by other foreign powers; they present challenges Australia hasn’t experienced before.

Given the fundamental, irreconcilable differences between China’s authoritarian political system and ours, our agencies are absolutely right to be vigilant about safeguarding Australian democracy and our institutions.

We also need the entirely valid security concerns to be balanced with Australia’s short, medium and long-term economic and foreign policy interests.

I come back again to sophistication. If we can’t quite manage sophistication, then consistency would be useful.

The Turnbull government has been, to put it mildly, all over the place about China.

The foreign interference regime surfaced at the time when the government was in full political pursuit of the Labor senator Sam Dastyari, creating confusion about whether the crackdown was motivated by short-term domestic interests rather than valid security concerns.

Turnbull himself has grown increasingly hawkish. The defence line is hawkish. Bishop navigates a diplomatic line consistent with security interests.

The trade minister, Steve Ciobo, says something different again.

This week, during a quite extraordinary interview on Sky News, Ciobo point blank refused to echo the language of the foreign and defence ministers on the South China Sea after an incident where a Chinese bomber capable of carrying a nuclear warhead had been on the disputed Paracel Islands.

The defence minister said that behaviour amounted to “destabilising actions”. But Ciobo, while noting Australia had a different position to China on the South China Sea, wondered out loud why we all just couldn’t get along.

Asked whether China should be landing bombers on disputed territory, Ciobo said: “That’s a decision for China. You might as well ask me should Russia do something with one of its submarines”.

“I’m not going to get engaged in a commentary lecturing other countries about what they can and cannot do,” the trade minister said. “I’m not going to engage in megaphone diplomacy with China, to talk about whether they should or should not land a particular aircraft in disputed territory”.

Honestly? It’s enough to make your head explode.