We can, it seems, be sure of three things in this life: death, taxes and that any story concerning China’s influence in our region will dominate the news cycle.
So it was when The Age reported on Monday that former foreign minister Bob Carr had been urging Labor Senator Kristina Keneally to grill the Prime Minister about the role and employment contract awarded to consultant and former adviser John Garnaut. It’s already kicked off calls that Carr be expelled from the Labor Party for his “disloyalty”.
Garnaut was in turn the subject of a front page report in yesterday’s Fairfax papers, regarding the the “aggressive interest” Chinese security officials reputedly took in him when grilling Australian-based dissident academic Chongyi Feng back in 2017.
Garnaut himself is not an academic, nor a career public servant — his primary source of expertise in China is his long career as a correspondent reporting from Beijing. Crikey took a look at the journey from Fairfax cadet to key figure in Chinese-Australian relations.
Impressive pedigree
John Garnaut is the son of academic Ross Garnaut, himself the possessor of an impressive resume. A distinguished professor of economics at the Australian National University and both a vice-chancellor’s fellow and professorial fellow of economics at The University of Melbourne, Garnaut Snr has been a senior economic adviser to prime minister Bob Hawke, Australia’s ambassador to China (where John lived with him for two years as a child) and chairman of BankWest. In 2007 he was appointed by state and territory governments to examine the impacts of climate change on the Australian economy.
Early career
Garnaut the Younger joined Fairfax as a cadet in 2002, after a three-year stint at commercial lawyers Hall and Wilcox. Within a year he was Fairfax’s economics editor in the Canberra press gallery and in 2007 he took up the role of China correspondent in Beijing.
China
Altogether Garnaut reported on China for Fairfax for eight years, graduating from correspondent to Asia Pacific editor in 2013, where he would stay for the remainder of his time in journalism. His work on China was credible and relatively measured — and it’s worth noting that for all the furore over Liberal MP Andrew Hastie’s decision to name Australian-Chinese businessman Chau Chak Wing as an unindicted co-conspirator in a US bribery case (while cloaked in parliamentary privilege), Garnaut was the first Australian journo to be sued by Chau when he did the same thing back in 2015.
Politics and analysis
Garnaut moved on to work for Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in 2015 as a senior adviser. In 2016 he was appointed to head the team compiling a report on the actions of the Chinese Communist Party on Australian democracy.
While “top secret”, the report is supposed to have found meddling by Chinese interests at every level of government. Along with the damning revelations aired by Fairfax and the ABC, it formed the basis for Turnbull’s sweeping foreign interference reforms announced late last year. Garnaut moved on from Turnbull’s direct employ in mid 2017, founding JG Global a consultancy group which advises governments and private companies on China.
It was in this capacity that Garnaut was called to testify at a US House committee hearing on “State and Non-State Actor Influence Operations” (apparently they have some interest in foreign influences on the process of democracy too…). No longer beholden to any notions of diplomacy, Garnaut was unsparing. He told the committee the CCP used “brazen and aggressive” tactics to influence foreign institutions and they “coerced and intimidated” dissenters overseas.
It would help us, the public, to hear from the Department. After all, they are the ones who know who is coming, who would like to come, who needs to come etc. While the Department and their Minister tells us what they are doing right, the Opposition pollies can tell us how they could do better.
Does Garnaut hold an ‘National Security Clearance’ and at what level? If not does he hold an exemption from the need to be cleared and who authorised this exemption? Likewise, does Andrew Hastie hold such a clearance?
Good questions Terry and good reporting Crikey. I’m starting to get really uneasy about what this government is up to.
I left “uneasy” behind long ago, Vasco.
Fairfax have headed up with another story on ZTE this morning. McKenzie’s getting all this from Garnaut, little doubt.
What follows is something I submitted to the readers’ comments, first thing. The comment count was zero when I sent it off. It’s still zero 90 minutes later. Always knew it was long odds to get a run.
“OK, so we’re talking about a US company making allegations, in commercial litigation, against a Chinese company operating in Liberia.
Fairfax regularly republish articles from the UK Telegraph.
This is a Telegraph article from 2009, pertaining to the sort of ‘business’ the US has long conducted in that very same African country, Liberia;
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/liberia/9021153/Liberian-despot-Charles-Taylor-worked-with-US-intelligence.html
And, all that goes way beyond allegations being lodged in commercial litigation.
Then, just for kicks, given this is another article about the influence and control the Chinese state exerts over its enterprises, you might like to ‘investigate’ the connections between DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is run by the US Department of Defence), and the likes of Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and a whole lot of other US T&IT enterprises. Oh, and throw in the CIA for good measure.
Those connections go all the way back to when those enterprises were starting up. In fact, a number of them would not have even started up, without being handed the technology developed by the US state owned DARPA and co.
And, those connections continue to this day, including the channelling of DARPA personnel to those ‘commercial enterprises’, and right up to the top.
In Google’s case, one of the latest JV’s with the US government is how to kill better by drone.
Don’t believe me?
Google it!”
The Dragon we’ve been happily cuddling for the last 3 decades gave us a standard of living unattached, and way beyond, our general level of industrial, commercial or entrepreneurial achievements.
Even our meretricious diploma mills… sorry, universities would be at the bottom of the harbour without mainland students.
Let’s just hope that they take a more mature view of this B/S than the bloviatariat.
I wouldn’t hold high hopes for this nation’s academia taking a more “mature view…than the bloviatariat, AR.
Just this week, Crikey gave us an idea of how ANU roll (i.e. the establishment of another Abbottista (un)think tank).
Well, how about the hallowed halls of Melb Uni?
This is written by one of the better ‘balanced’ members of local academia – Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/universities-branding-and-saudi-arabia/5642303
“Short shrift, in other words, is being given to the functions of actual critical thinking, the very stuff Watterston boasts about somewhat uncritically. But that will not bother him, or those who have put their signatures in this particular form of international engagement. The perks are bound to be endless. Like the selling of arms, education is a business designed to line pockets, feed the parasites of management, and enhance an empty brand. Forget the students – they are the last in the dismal food chain. Even more importantly, ignore the politics of it all.”