Category Archives: Australian foreign policy

Witness K and the Australian spying operation that continues to betray Timor-Leste

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Charges against Bernard Collaery and his retired Asis agent client confirm the government has few regrets about an exploitative exercise against a friendly neighbour

In the first week of January 2019, a private jet landed at Presidente Nicolau Lobato International Airport in Dili, the capital of Timor-Leste. The former Victorian premier Steve Bracks emerged into the monsoonal heat and was greeted by staff from the office of Xanana Gusmão, Timor-Leste’s chief maritime boundary negotiator. They drove Bracks to the waterfront café at the Novo Turismo Resort and Spa, where Gusmão was waiting.

The subject of the meeting was Bernard Collaery, Gusmão’s former lawyer, who was pleading not guilty to breaches of Australia’s intelligence act. Collaery’s charges related to an Australian Secret Intelligence Service operation in Dili in 2004, in which Canberra is believed to have recorded Timor-Leste officials’ private discussions about maritime boundary negotiations with Australia. In 2013, the Australian government revealed the allegations of spying.

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China has only itself to blame for Australia’s move on Hong Kong

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The Australian government and its partners had no choice but to recognise the new reality in the territory and offer some of its citizens a way out

I feel sorry for Chinese foreign ministry officials, with whom I have had many good conversations over the years. They have been pushed to lambast Australia and other Western democracies with such frequency that they risk running out of fresh invective, hyperbole and idiom.

It was inevitable that Chinese diplomats would excoriate Australia after prime minister Scott Morrison’s measured moves this week in response to Beijing’s draconian national security legislation for Hong Kong: offering limited sanctuary to Hong Kongers, suspending an extradition treaty with Hong Kong and heightening the travel warning for the city.

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Australian politics live: consular officials talk to Karm Gilespie, Australian man facing death penalty in China – latest updates

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Foreign affairs minister Marise Payne says Australian authorities visited the detention centre where the 53-year-old is being held. Follow live

Julian Hill is looking at the government’s spend on consultants (an evergreen sentence, no matter what political party is in government)

New analysis by the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) has found that the big four consultancy firms – Deloitte, Ernest&Young, KPMG and PwC – now collectively reap $800m a year in government contracts.

But only 20% of that figure is spent on actual consultancy contracts, meaning the Morrison government is paying top dollar to large consultancy firms to work as contractors doing the day-to-day work of public servants.

The Australia Institute has begun a new campaign to have truth in advertising part of Australia’s political advertising.

An open letter coordinated by the Australia Institute and signed by 29 prominent Australians calls for parliament to pass truth-in-political advertising laws that are nationally consistent, constitutional and uphold freedom of speech.

Signatories to the open letter include former political party leaders and politicians, Dr John Hewson, Cheryl Kernot and Michael Beahan; former supreme court judges, the Hon Anthony Whealy QC, the Hon Paul Stein AM QC and the Hon David Harper AM QC, as well as barristers, community leaders, business people and other prominent Australians.

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Australian government tells ICC it should not investigate alleged war crimes in Palestine

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International Criminal Court rejects Australia’s argument it has no jurisdiction because Palestine is ‘not a state’

The Australian government has told the International Criminal Court it should not investigate alleged war crimes in Palestine because Palestine is “not a state”, arguing the court prosecutor’s investigation into alleged attacks on civilians, torture, attacks on hospitals, and the use of human shields, should be halted on jurisdictional grounds.

Australia was lobbied to make the submission to the court by Israel, which is not a party to the court. But the office of the prosecutor has rejected Australia’s argument, saying it had not formally challenged Palestine’s right to be a party to the court before.

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Australian children remain trapped in al-Hawl camp as region braces for coronavirus

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Fresh calls for Australia to repatriate its citizens amid fears the camp is vulnerable to a Covid-19 outbreak

Forty-seven Australian children remain trapped in the abject al-Hawl camp in north-east Syria, as the region braces for a potential Covid-19 outbreak.

Syria has reported only a handful of cases, and there are none confirmed in the camp housing 68,000 women and children, most of them family of Islamic State fighters, but there has been little Covid-19 testing across the war-torn country.

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Kylie Moore-Gilbert: jailed British-Australian not among 70,000 prisoners freed in Iran as coronavirus spreads

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Political prisoners, including the University of Melbourne academic, have overwhelmingly been excluded from furloughing

Iran has temporarily freed 70,000 prisoners from jails around the country out of fear coronavirus could spread through prisons unchecked, but British-Australian academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert has not been released.

Political prisoners have overwhelmingly been excluded from the furloughing of prisoners, with other dual nationals such as Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, an Iranian-born British aid worker, remaining imprisoned despite growing concerns for their health.

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Coronavirus: Australia considers evacuating citizens caught in China amid lockdown

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Chief medical officer says Australia is ‘incredibly well prepared to isolate and deal with’ any more cases

Australia’s chief medical officer has warned there will likely be more cases of the deadly coronavirus confirmed in the country, as the federal government explores plans to evacuate Australian citizens from the pandemic’s epicentre in central China.

Prof Brendan Murphy, Australia’s chief medical officer, said more cases of 2019-nCoV were likely, following the confirmation of four cases.

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Jailed British-Australian Kylie Moore-Gilbert rejected Iran’s offer to work as a spy

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Melbourne University academic rebuffed bid to recruit her in exchange for her release, letters reveal

Iran tried to recruit the British-Australian academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert as a spy for Tehran in exchange for her release, but the overture was furiously rebuffed, letters smuggled out of Evin prison reveal.

Moore-Gilbert, a Cambridge-educated academic specialising in Middle East politics, is currently being held in Ward 2A, an isolated Revolutionary Guard-run wing of Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, serving a 10-year sentence for espionage, a charge she, and the Australian government, rejects as entirely false.

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Australian academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert begs Scott Morrison to help get her out of Iranian jail

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Letter comes as human rights groups urge foreign governments to take a stronger line with Tehran

The imprisoned British-Australian academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert has begged the Australian prime minister to secure her release from an Iranian jail, as human rights groups urge foreign governments to take a stronger line with Tehran.

A Cambridge-educated academic specialising in Middle East politics, Moore-Gilbert has been imprisoned in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison since September 2018, after she was arrested at Tehran airport while trying to leave the country after attending an academic conference.

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Iran says jailed Australian academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert must serve out her sentence

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Tehran’s foreign ministry says it will not submit to ‘political games and propaganda’

An Australian academic jailed in Iran for espionage must serve out her sentence, Tehran’s foreign ministry said on Saturday, stressing it would not submit to “propaganda”.

Kylie Moore-Gilbert reportedly began a hunger strike in Tehran’s Evin prison on Tuesday after losing an appeal against a 10-year jail sentence.

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China’s ambassador to Australia says reports of detention of 1m Uighurs ‘fake news’

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Cheng Jingye also says detained Australian writer Yang Hengjun’s rights are being protected

China’s ambassador to Australia has labelled reports that one million Uighurs are being held in detention “fake news”, seeking to excuse mass incarceration as a deradicalisation measure.

At a rare press conference at the Chinese embassy in Canberra, Cheng Jingye claimed the mass detention in Xinjiang province had “nothing to do with human rights, nothing to do with religion” and was “no different” from other countries’ counter-terrorism measures.

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Birth of boy sparks renewed calls to rescue Australians in Syria’s squalid al-Hawl camp

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Brutal winter, poor healthcare and limited food raises fears for welfare of infant, born to Sydney woman Rayan Hamdoush

An Australian woman has given birth to a baby boy in the al-Hawl camp in Syria, prompting revived calls for Australia to rescue 67 nationals still held in the camp.

Rayan Hamdoush, 24, from western Sydney, was pregnant when she entered al-Hawl. She gave birth to the boy on 30 November. The boy’s father, Samer Hajj Obeid, also from Sydney, is missing.

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‘Atrocity of the century’: Uighur activist urges Australia to take tougher stance against China

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Rushan Abbas says countries doing business with China are enabling its mass detention of 3 million people, including her sister

A leading Uighur activist, Rushan Abbas, has urged Australian MPs to take a stronger stance against the Chinese regime, while backing controversial comparisons between the state’s authoritarianism and Nazi Germany.

Abbas, who met with MPs in Canberra on Thursday and held a roundtable at the US Embassy on the plight of the Uighur Muslim minority in western China’s Xinjiang province, said that “modern day” concentration camps holding as many as 3 million Uighurs were a case of “history repeating itself”.

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Police ask Clover Moore for statement on Angus Taylor – politics live

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Sydney lord mayor approached by police investigating accusations the emissions reduction minister relied on a falsified document to attack her. Follow all the day’s political news live

That’s where we’ll leave the live blog for the day. Thanks for following along.

It’s been another messy day. Many say the medevac repeal has made it one of parliament’s darkest.

Another development on the Angus Taylor front.

The City of Sydney’s lord mayor, Clover Moore, has been approached by police to provide a statement for their investigation into accusations Taylor relied on a falsified document to attack her travel-related emissions. The council said in a statement:

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Freed Taliban hostage Timothy Weeks says he never gave up hope

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Australian teacher thanks those who helped free him and says he formed tight bonds with some of his captors

Freed Taliban hostage Timothy Weeks says he never gave up hope he would be rescued during three “long and tortuous” years in captivity in Afghanistan.

Speaking publicly for the first time since his release as part of a complex prisoner swap almost two weeks ago, the Australian teacher thanked all those who helped secure his freedom, and said he had formed extraordinarily tight bonds with some of his Taliban captors.

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Labor condemns ‘disgraceful’ Westpac as Hartzer stands down – politics live

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Westpac chief executive’s resignation draws little sympathy on all sides of politics. All the day’s events, live

And here is another indication of where question time is headed:

Last week, a bank broke money laundering laws 23 million times.

But instead of going after them, the Liberals are going after unions – trying to take away their right to exist.

This Government hates working people. We'll fight them every step of the way. pic.twitter.com/9vMhFquk4W

A group of north Queensland dairy farmers are on their way to Canberra to express their frustrations at what is happening within their industry.

That’s at the same time the Nationals are trying to get ahead of Pauline Hanson, who may have come late to the issues, but certainly has been running full steam ahead since becoming aware of it.

David Littleproud, the drought minister, some time ago said he fixed the supermarket [milk price] problem. He said he thumped his chest, waved his fists at them, and demanded they put their milk prices up.

Well, we know that solution lasted about five minutes.

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Stuart Robert on robodebt: ‘This government does not apologise’ – politics live

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Aged-care package ‘falls well short’ of what is required, Labor says; Morrison responds to Chinese spy plot allegations; and Jacqui Lambie ‘not supporting a repeal’ of medevac, Rex Patrick says. All the day’s events, live

And on that note, we are going to ground this plane - but we will be back tomorrow morning for more fun and games.

There are officially seven sitting days left. Medevac and ensuring integrity are still high on the government’s wish list, but, as always the crossbench is the key. It looks like the government has agreed to Pauline Hanson’s amendments for the union bill, but she is still holding out. Jacqui Lambie has a diary full of meetings when it comes to medevac. Keep a close eye on that one.

Something to watch out for, tomorrow

Our 2019 Mapping #SocialCohesionReport launches tomorrow, 26 November. The report produced in partnership with @MonashUni researchers uses a comprehensive survey to gauge a nuanced understanding of shifts in public opinion on social cohesion and population issues.

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Claim of Chinese spy plot in Australia ‘deeply disturbing’, Scott Morrison says

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‘Australia is not naive’ to threats of foreign interference, PM says, but cautions against ‘leaping to conclusions’

Prime minister Scott Morrison says Australia is “not naive” to the threat of foreign interference amid explosive claims that the Chinese communist party wanted to infiltrate Australia’s parliament.

Describing the alleged plot as “deeply disturbing and troubling”, Morrison said the government was determined to protect Australians from foreign interference and had bolstered laws to strengthen the powers of intelligence agencies.

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Experts dispel claims of China debt-trap diplomacy in Pacific but risks remain

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Beijing should substantially reform its lending practices, Lowy Institute says

China has not engaged in deliberate “debt-trap diplomacy” in the Pacific, but the burgeoning scale of China’s lending, and institutional weakness within Pacific states, pose clear risks for small states being overwhelmed by debt, a new report argues.

And an infrastructure arms race between China and other countries with interests in the region – including Australia – might only exacerbate the problem.

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Donald Trump’s bizarre logic damages US allies’ trust in intelligence sharing | Daniel Flitton

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The US president appears to believe Australian spies are part of a deep-state conspiracy. Australia should be wary of the risks of getting drawn into his defence

It really is a poke in the eye – the “Five Eyes”, that is. Donald Trump’s telephone call to Scott Morrison, revealed on Tuesday in the New York Times, where he pressed for help in investigating the origins of the Mueller inquiry, will doubtless put a further strain on what is otherwise a very close intelligence-sharing partnership between the United States and Australia.

Why? Because aside from the unwanted political distraction of putting Australia at the centre of another Trump tirade (just as Morrison was seeking to apply the blowtorch to Labor at home for what he called “naive and immature” remarks about China), the twisted logic of Trump’s allegation is truly extraordinary.

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