Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

A few days ago 'Big China' were up in parliament, like big tobacco, whingeing and whining about how they'd been misunderstood. One of their particular whinges was about the 5G network and the concerns about their company Huawei, which were first raised in The Economist, in the legendary article 'Huawei: the company that spooked the world'.

Some years ago, under pressure from Labor, which demanded a security briefing, the then communications minister, now Prime Minister, was forced to bar Huawei from bidding for the new core of the Australian telecommunications network, the NBN. Now we have that situation again, with 5G. Since my previous remarks, the chairman of Huawei Technologies, Admiral Lord, has denied Beijing's influence over the company, stating to the ABC:

There is no ownership by the Government whatsoever—

basically implying that they are a workers collective. This directly contradicts the testimony that he and his company gave to a public hearing of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security on 14 September 2012. In it, Admiral Lord and his associate admitted that Huawei, like other large Beijing enterprises, has a legally mandated Communist Party committee at the top and stated that, yes, all the big organisations have a party committee. There's nothing unusual with all of these Beijing companies having to report to the Communist Party committee, but don't tell the Australian public that you don't have to.