Quarterly Essay 76 Red Flag by Peter Hartcher

Author:Peter Hartcher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Books Pty. Ltd.

A WATCHDOG WITH TEETH

It was a sunny day in a Melbourne summer, perfect for lunch outdoors. John Garnaut and his wife, Tara Wilkinson, were in the city, without their kids for a bit, and spontaneously decided to eat at one of the restaurants in the city’s famous Federation Square. John had left government service with the satisfaction of having seen the parliament act on his classified report into covert Chinese government interference, passing two new laws against it, and now worked as a consultant. But when they sat down at a table at the Chocolate Buddha, the couple found they couldn’t enjoy their lunch. Four people approached, separately, and hovered nearby, uncomfortably close. Men and women. They were conspicuous; it was not a very busy time at the Chocolate Buddha. They said nothing, but would stare at John and Tara until the couple turned to look at them, and then quickly look away. One even sat at the same table, but without ordering, until the waiter asked him to move. He then sat at the nearest corner of the next table. It was unnerving, a deliberate act of intimidation.

“How are you?” John asked one woman in Mandarin. She said nothing and abruptly left. But, oddly, she returned ten minutes later wearing a different-coloured shirt. The group persisted even after John and Tara got up to leave, until Tara started to film them with her phone camera. One man was walking directly towards her until she produced the phone, at which he immediately started walking sideways, crab-style, to avoid having his face recorded.

It wasn’t the only act of harassment against Garnaut and his family, but it was a notably overt one. The message was plain: you have displeased the Chinese government and we are going to punish you. We can always find you, we know where you live, we can act with impunity in the middle of Australia’s biggest cities. We don’t care that you worked for a prime minister. We are not afraid of Australia’s authorities. It was 24 January 2019. The foreign influence laws had taken effect six weeks earlier.

Their conduct didn’t mark them as professionals. But whoever tipped them off to Garnaut’s whereabouts probably was. Federal agencies were vexed about how to respond. John and Tara took their problem to Victoria Police. The couple sat down with three plainclothes investigators from the Organised Crime Unit at a café in Little Bourke Street in August. As Tara recounted some of her experiences, one of the police officers leaned forward and interrupted: “Do you realise the people behind you are filming us?” The stalkers helpfully had provided firsthand evidence to the police. An investigation into potential criminal stalking was underway at the time of writing.

The never-ending pursuit of power, the relentlessly expanding influence and the paranoid nature of the Chinese Communist Party means that it will continue to press outwards unless and until it meets resistance. At home and abroad, it imposes one control after another until it is satisfied that it has total control.

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