Claire Chandler (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to speak about the revelation that six Australian members of parliament and senators, myself included, were personally targeted by a PRC state sponsored hacking group. As members of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, we were targeted by this group specifically because we are members of this Australian parliament, from both major parties, who have been willing to speak out publicly about the Chinese Communist Party's human rights abuses, its coercive behaviour towards Australia and its growing and increasingly dangerous aggression.

It isn't overly surprising the CCP and its army of hackers would target its critics in parliaments around the world, but what was staggering is that our own security and intelligence services were told we were targeted more than two years ago—but they never told us. We found out this month only after IPAC became aware following the unsealing of a US indictment against the hackers.

The targeting of democratically elected parliamentarians in this cyberhack is clearly an attempt by an authoritarian regime to find new ways to manipulate our democratic processes. That's one of the many reasons it is unacceptable that parliamentarians weren't told when we were targeted. While we have since been assured this initial attempt wasn't successful in extracting any information, the nature of malicious cyberactivity is that hackers will probe defences for weaknesses until they find one.

In the same week we were finally notified of the attempted hack of our emails, we learnt that a Chinese hack on Britain's Ministry of Defence had potentially exposed the personal details of 270,000 serving personnel. Nobody can assume that their systems are permanently immune from cyberattacks, and that's why anyone personally targeted should be told so that they can increase their guard against the next attempt.

The behaviour of the Chinese government and its proxies is undoubtedly the single biggest security and foreign affairs challenge that our nation currently confronts. If we are going to be successful in this challenge, both parliamentarians and the voting public need to be given a clear and accurate picture of the Chinese government's pattern of behaviour. The withholding of information that Australian parliamentarians were personally targeted by state sponsored hackers clearly diminishes our ability to understand the real extent of the Chinese government's behaviour towards Australia.

Since being appointed as shadow assistant minister for foreign affairs in 2022 I have written extensively about the risk of Australia falling into a Beijing-made myth that problems in the Australia-China relationship are the fault of Australia and that stabilisation requires the Australian government to moderate its language and refocus on the money that can be made from doing business with China. It's deeply concerning to see narratives manufactured in Beijing permeating Australian commentary and decision-making while things which should be spoken about in Australia go left unsaid.

To a large extent we have been effectively coached by Beijing to view China through the extremely narrow prism of bilateral diplomatic exchanges and trade. In the last term of government the Chinese government chose to cut off ministerial dialogues with Australia and to implement a number of trade restrictions. In the intervening period the Chinese government has formed a no-limits partnership with Putin's Russia and supported its invasion of Ukraine; increased its aggression against the Philippines in the South China Sea; strengthened partnerships with North Korea and Iran; been responsible for a succession of highly dangerous military actions towards Australia, Canada and US defence personnel; and escalated its espionage and cyberattacks against Western nations. Despite these realities our government has chosen to focus heavily on trade and dialogue with China.

For many Australian commentators and government ministers, pointing out the dangerous trajectory of the Chinese government's behaviour is considered uncouth and passe, and carefully scripted slogans like 'cooperate where we can, disagree where we must' are the diplomatic order of the day. By cutting off dialogue and restricting trade, just a few years later Beijing has successfully made trade and dialogue almost the only China related topics we are supposed to talk about in Australia. This month's dangerous action by a Chinese fighter jet against an Australian Navy helicopter and the Albanese government's lacklustre response to it show us the reality of the China situation much more clearly than carefully scripted diplomatic exchanges or red wine sales. In a democracy which plans to spend hundreds of billions over coming decades to prepare for that reality, Australians should be told the unvarnished truth by our government about the Chinese government's current trajectory.