Bombshell revelations are exposing the depth of the Chinese Communist Party’s interference in Australian elections. This follows the shocking news that a CCP foreign influence operation was recruiting ‘volunteers’ for Teal and Labor candidates and directing diaspora Chinese to vote for selected candidates.
The claims are so serious that the Australian Electoral Commission has announced a special taskforce investigation.
Australia’s election watchdog has confirmed it will refer allegations that the Hubei Association was planning to send out dozens of Chinese volunteers to Labor Minister Clare O’Neil and the Greens Party to a national taskforce for investigation.
The taskforce is made up of officials from several government agencies, including the federal police, ASIO and the AEC. Cabinet minister Ms O’Neil has been embroiled in an election-eve controversy over Chinese campaign volunteers, with confirmation 10 individuals linked to an organisation associated with Beijing’s foreign influence operation were being recruited to staff her polling booths on election day.
The taskforce is already investigating interference in ‘Teal’ MP Monique Ryan’s campaign, which she is defending against a strong campaign by Amelia Hamer, grand-niece of former decade-long Victorian premier, Rupert Hamer. The campaign has been marred by dirty tricks, including video of Ryan’s husband tearing down her opponent’s election signage and anti-Semitic activists mock-campaigning for Hamer dressed as ‘Jews’.
The Hubei Association is a Chinese diaspora organisation representing people from the Chinese province. It has previously been linked to the United Front Work Department (UFWD), an overseas influence-peddling arm of the central committee of the CCP. In an a shocking video exchange, two Chinese-speaking volunteers for Ryan’s campaign said that they were told to do so by the president of the Hubei Association, Ji Jianmin. Jianmin, she said (in Chinese), ‘required us Chinese diaspora to support her’.
The Hubei Association is also mobilising diaspora Chinese to campaign for Labor and the Greens.
The Australian can reveal Chinese-Australian Labor Party member Chap Chow, who describes himself as a “friend” of the minister he ass [sic] been “helping out”, organised with the Hubei Association in the past week to recruit volunteers for her electorate of Hotham.
But in a sudden about-face, Mr Chow contacted Hubei Association president Ji Jianmin on Tuesday morning – after news of its volunteers being involved in teal MP Monique Ryan’s Kooyong campaign broke, prompting the Australian Electoral Commission to order a federal investigation – to cancel the 10 volunteers.
It’s not the first time Chow has interfered in Australian elections. He has, he says, ‘mobilised’ diaspora Chinese for Labor over multiple federal elections. Worse, he has meddled in AEC plans to redistribute federal electoral boundaries. Chow lobbied to isolate areas with high numbers of Hong Kong and Taiwanese immigrants from those with large proportions of mainland Chinese.
The Australian has obtained an email written last year by Mr Chow relating to the AEC’s redistribution in which he “expressed his concerns” over the plan to include the suburb of Box Hill in the electorate of Menzies.
In the letter, the Labor Party member suggested it would be better to keep voters with mainland Chinese heritage apart from Hong Kong and Taiwanese people if possible to “avoid riots”.
“The electorate of Menzies contains two suburbs … Doncaster and Templestowe which respectively each accommodates large proportion of Chinese Australians,” the email states.
“Box Hill too contains quite a large proportion of Chinese … the only difference is, while the Chinese who live in Doncaster and Templestowe are mainly immigrants from Taiwan and Hong Kong, those who live in Box Hill are predominantly from mainland China.”
Purely coincidentally, no doubt, the changes meant that Labor’s margin in the neighbouring Chisholm electorate was slashed from 6.4 per cent, to just 3.2 per cent. Menzies, meanwhile, is held by Labor on a razor-thin 0.4 per cent.
Clearly, then, the Chinese Communist Party is desperate for a Labor and the Teals win. We can only speculate why.
