Sydney”•Australia announced a diplomatic boost to “turbo-charge” its China relations on Friday as it seeks to mend the ties damaged by foreign interference concerns and a 5G bar on Huawei.
Canberra unveiled plans for a new foundation to supercede the Australia-China Council, its long-time primary platform for relations with its largest trading partner.
The government also announced that career diplomat Graham Fletcher, a China expert and Mandarin speaker, would replace Jan Adams as Australia’s ambassador in Beijing. Adams had served in the role since 2016.
Foreign Minister Marise Payne said the new National Foundation for Australia-China Relations would receive Aus$44 (US$31) million over five years, significantly broadening the remit of its predecessor.
She said the more than 40-year-old Council had remained “static even as China has transformed and our bilateral ties have dramatically expanded in breadth and complexity.”
She said the “substantially increased” funding would allow the new body to “move beyond the Council’s current focus on education, culture and the arts, to also promote Australian excellence in areas such as agriculture, infrastructure, health and aging and the environment and energy.”
“It will harness efforts of the private sector, peak bodies, NGOs, cultural organizations, state and federal agencies and the Chinese-Australian community to turbo-charge our national effort in engaging China.”
While noting that the two countries “share common objectives” in many areas, Payne said there were “different perspectives on some important issues” that would be a focus of the new foundation.
Bilateral ties have soured, notably since Canberra passed sweeping national security reforms last year to strengthen foreign interference laws, calling out China as its primary concern, and setting off a string of diplomatic flare-ups.
A high-profile Australian senator was forced to quit politics in 2017 over his links to Chinese billionaire Huang Xiangmo, a permanent Australian resident who last month was banned from returning to the country following scrutiny of his Communist Party ties.
Beijing has dismissed the claims of political interference as paranoia and hysteria.
Australia last year also announced guidelines for contractors to build fifth-generation — or 5G — mobile networks that effectively blocked Chinese telecom giant Huawei.
Canberra cited intelligence agency warnings against using vendors subject to “extrajudicial directions from a foreign government”.
Mike Burgess from the national cybersecurity agency, the Australian Signals Directorate, said that 5G is still maturing, but will be “critically important” to Australia, with the future technology enabling key infrastructure, like power grids.
“There will be machines talking to machines, devices talking to devices — enabled by 5G,” he told Sydney-based think tank the Lowy Institute Wednesday, adding the “availability” of the network is the agency’s primary concern.
“So high-risk vendors for us are categorized as vendors that actually have headquarters in countries, where those countries have capability, form and intent and coercive laws that compel their companies to cooperate on matters of national intelligence,” he said.
