Submission to AUKUS Public Inquiry – Citizens Party – foreign interests used Australian Strategic Policy Institute to foment fear of China and drum up support for AUKUS

149. Robert Barwick On behalf of Citizens Party

AUKUS is the policy product of foreign interference
On 15 February 2024 Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) senior analyst Dr
Alex Bristow explicitly connected the willingness of the Australian public to bear
the growing cost of military spending that AUKUS represents, with our level of
alarm about one country—China.

“We will not generate or sustain public consent for necessary rises in defence
spending and the whole-of-nation effort required in the years ahead until our
national security establishment stops treating China as a taboo subject in public”,
Dr Bristow wrote in an article on the ASPI website (https://www.aspi.org.au/strateg
ist-posts/we-mustnt-be-afraid-to-mention-china-in-public-discussions-about-defenc
e/).

There you have it—focus on China to “generate” public consent for mega-spends
like AUKUS.

However, this was not mere advice from ASPI; the AUKUS Public Inquiry should
examine how ASPI has taken the lead on focussing Australians’ attention on China
for more than a decade, and how it has been funded by the US and UK
governments, as well as American and British weapons manufacturers, to do so.
Having paid ASPI in the low tens of millions of dollars over more than a decade to
make repeated, mostly unfounded and always exaggerated accusations against
China in Australia, the US and UK governments and their biggest weapons
companies have already received billions of Australian dollars through the AUKUS
program.

This is the universal business model of the military-industrial complex: sponsor
think tanks that relentlessly hype tensions and threats; cash in with defence
contracts.

Analysis by APAC News published 31 March 2021 (ASPI sponsors collect billions
from Defence) showed that ASPI received almost $7 million in sponsorship and
commercial revenue the previous year, the majority from foreign governments and
weapons companies.

APAC News reported that since 2001, weapons companies that sponsored ASPI
had collectively received more than $51 billion in contracts from the Australian
government.

Because of its funding, ASPI became a specialist in hyping a China “threat”
narrative.
The AUKUS agreement was announced later in 2021 following an intense period of
relentless anti-China commentary from ASPI.

The quality of ASPI’s analysis varies, from sometimes competent analysis, such as
its assessments of China’s technological capabilities, to ridiculous, baseless
fearmongering.

For example, this year is the 10th anniversary of a particularly embarrassing
instance of ASPI inciting baseless hysteria. In 2016, when Australia conducted its
first online census, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) census website portal
failed, overwhelmed by the public trying to access it on census night. ASPI
Executive Director Peter Jennings immediately jumped to shape the media
narrative by claiming China hacked the census. “I think we’ve had quite a
sophisticated attempt to take down the ABS and maybe also to steal information,”
he told the ABC. “They [China] have the capacity to do this and the interest to do
it.” The ABS later concluded that there was no hack—the IBM hardware hosting the
website was inadequate for the job.

The census claim was a harbinger of things to come, as 2016 coincided with a shift
in US policy towards confronting the rise of China, which ASPI faithfully
represented in Australia.

For a decade, ASPI has pumped out allegations of Chinese cyberattacks on
Australian institutions, foreign interference in Australian politics and the Australian
Chinese community, Chinese infiltration of Australian universities through
academic research collaboration, Chinese bots manipulating Australian social
media, and more.

Because the Citizens Party regularly fact-checked ASPI’s claims, and debunked
most of them, it also became ASPI’s target: an ASPI report in 2023 claimed that
Chinese bot accounts on Twitter were boosting two things: statements by former
prime minister Paul Keating, and the Citizens Party’s campaign to stop banks from
closing branches in regional Australia! (The bot accounts ASPI identified had no
followers and no engagement, and ASPI didn’t prove they were Chinese.)

In this period the Australian media has amplified ASPI’s claims, and ASPI personnel
became permanent, ubiquitous fixtures on media interviews and current affairs
shows when anything to do with China was in the news—without ever declaring
the conflict of interest from their funding.

The Citizens Party urges the AUKUS Public Inquiry to examine the way the foreign
interests which are profiting from AUKUS used ASPI to shape public opinion in
Australia to accept the bill for AUKUS.