There is a reason why the AFP won’t call out China

Two things clearly emerge from a series of interviews conducted with the members of the most powerful police clique in the world – the Five Eyes Law Enforcement Group (FELEG).

Intelligence identifies China as the state actor posing the gravest threat to Australia by engaging in foreign interference, espionage, cybercrime and diaspora harassment.

And, even though he knows it, the highest ranking police officer in this country can’t publicly say so.

It would be easy for China hawks to attack Australian Federal Police Commissioner Reece Kershaw for his studied, stubborn refusal to mention Beijing on the sidelines of the recent FELEG meeting in Melbourne.

This is especially so given the robust stance towards Beijing adopted by his counterparts at the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, Canada’s Mounties and Britain’s top policing agencies.

Unsurprisingly, the Americans adopt the fiercest rhetoric against their superpower rival, with the FBI accusing Beijing of engaging in corrupt, clandestine and criminal acts to subvert democracy in Australia and other Five Eyes nations.

But Canada, where the political class has been indifferent to Chinese Communist Party interference in domestic politics until a foreign influence scandal blew up this year, has backed up the FBI’s assessment that the CCP is enabling organised crime to destabilise the west.

The FBI goes as far as accusing China of fuelling the fentanyl epidemic in North America by failing to regulate its precursor export industry.

The UK, where Russia looms as the most hostile state actor, is also calling out Beijing. All three Five Eyes nations have moved against extraterritorial, covert Chinese police stations that police officials claim were set up to track and intimidate dissidents.

If Kershaw’s reluctance to discuss China’s activities was due to Beijing’s economic coercion or the desire of Australia’s foreign affairs and trade officials to keep our biggest trading partner onside, it would be troubling.

But Kershaw’s careful language needs to be viewed in the prism of maintaining a flow of intelligence from Chinese authorities about drug shipments from triad syndicates that arrive on Australian shores every other week.

His is an unenviable juggling act. Kershaw’s federal agents have run exhaustive investigations into espionage and foreign interference allegedly conducted by Beijing’s security services in Australia.

At the same time, the AFP relies on information from these same security services to stop Australians dying of drug overdoses.

In stark contrast to the FBI, Kershaw also refuses to discuss Beijing’s malign influence activities in the Pacific.

But the $317 million given to the federal police by the Albanese government in the recent federal budget to expand its footprint in the Pacific is designed, at least in part, to counter China’s own efforts to expand its influence.

The FBI’s public claims that the CCP has greenlighted organised crime figures on Pacific Islands nations to act as agents of influence explains why Kershaw pushed so strongly for this funding. Even if he won’t say it publicly.

Watch the full interview with the Five Eyes enforcement chiefs on 60 Minutes, Sunday night, 8.45pm

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