Rex Patrick (SA, Independent) | Hansard source

Two themes of my work as a senator have been national security and campaigning for better transparency and accountability in government and in the parliament. Against the background of my service with the Royal Australian Navy, I've often spoken in the Senate about defence and security issues, including the rise of Chinese military power. In the years ahead, Australia will face new strategic challenges of a scale we have not experienced for decades. This emerging state of affairs has been highlighted this week by China's diplomatic manoeuvres to gain a military foothold in the Solomon Islands. To ensure Australian security, we will need to significantly boost the capabilities of the Australian Defence Force, much sooner than on the 20-year-long time frame contemplated by the present government.

Recent experience shows that Australia must be prepared to rely on our own resources—military and civilian—to a much greater extent than in the past. Sovereign capabilities and greater self-reliance will be vital for our future security. In particular, our critical infrastructure—especially telecommunications—must be completely secure from foreign interference and possible sabotage. Our vital defence industries, including naval construction, aerospace surveillance and electronic warfare capabilities in South Australia, must be fully safeguarded from espionage.

Anyone who seeks to represent our state in this parliament must be fully cognisant of these threats from the Chinese state and free from entanglement that might compromise their preparedness to act without reservation in Australia's national interest. In this regard, while I acknowledge former senator Nick Xenophon's political skills and past record as a representative of South Australia, I am strongly of the view, now that he has put his hand up to return to this place, that he must be completely transparent about his dealings with the Chinese telecommunications giant, Huawei.

This is a corporation closely aligned with the Chinese state and the Chinese Communist Party, and which has been implicated in Chinese state espionage. Huawei has also aided the internal surveillance activities of Chinese state security, especially the oppression of the Uighur people in Xinjiang. After his resignation from the Senate and failed 2018 political campaign to re-enter the South Australia parliament, Mr Xenophon undertook, through a new partnership with former journalist Mark Davis, to represent Huawei as its so-called 'strategic counsel'. At that time, in December 2019, Huawei had already been banned by the federal government. Since then, security concerns about Huawei have only grown.

For example, in February 2020 the US government disclosed that Huawei covertly exploited backdoors in carrier equipment supplied to law enforcement agencies. In October 2020, the British parliament's defence committee released a report detailing evidence of the close links and cooperation between Huawei, the Chinese state and the Chinese Communist Party. In December last year it was revealed, further, that as early as 2012 Australian intelligence detected a sophisticated penetration into our telecommunications system, an intrusion that began with a software update from Huawei that delivered malicious code.

While working for Huawei, Mr Xenophon did not register it with the Australian Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme. In this, he appears to have relied on the exemption for persons providing legal advice to foreign organisations and a claim that he was not directly lobbying government ministers. However, the work that Xenophon Davis did for Huawei appears to have been largely in the public relations field and directed towards influencing the federal government to reopen the door for Huawei to infiltrate Australia's 5G telecommunications network. That is of course one of 14 demands the Chinese government has made before they will reconsider their current hostile stance towards Australia.

Mr Xenophon declared that Huawei was an 'underdog'. I'm not sure how a vast Chinese conglomerate with global networks backed by the Chinese state could ever be described as an underdog, but that was his description. This was all a misjudgement on Mr Xenophon's part. He was entitled, as a private individual, to work for whoever he wished. But the choice he made was akin to someone choosing to do PR work for the German companies Krupp or Messerschmitt in 1938. Mr Xenophon now says that he has not worked for Huawei for some time, though we don't know when he ceased. He now claims to support the Australian government's 5G ban on Huawei. As a declared Senate candidate, he should now, in the interests of transparency and accountability, disclose the full details of his contractual relationship with Huawei. He should disclose the terms, conditions and duration of his contract; what instructions he accepted from Huawei; and precisely what services he and Mr Davis were paid for.

Speaking in 2016 about another former senator who took a controversial position in a business, then Senator Xenophon said:

… whether you're a minister or not. I think it's not unreasonable to disclose how much you're getting paid and how much lobbyists are getting paid for particular jobs.

Mr Xenophon chose not to make such a disclosure when he began working for Huawei. He hasn't done so since.

It has always been my view that if Mr Xenophon were to again be a candidate for public office he would need to be fully transparent about his work for Huawei. We have to be very clear about the nature of the company that he has been engaged with. It's a huge Chinese corporation, intimately connected with the CCP, which supports Chinese state espionage and which, according to documents published in the Washington Post in December last year, has helped Chinese authorities create the surveillance network that targets that country's Uighur minority.

There can't be any compromise when it comes to Australian national security, nor can there be compromises on human rights. Mr Xenophon has declared his political candidacy. In the interests of accountability and transparency, he should make an immediate disclosure of all the details of his work for Huawei. I urge him to do so. Voters can then make their own judgement.