We can, it seems, be sure of three things in this life: death, taxes and that any story concerning China’s influence in our region will dominate the news cycle.
So it was when The Age reported on Monday that former foreign minister Bob Carr had been urging Labor Senator Kristina Keneally to grill the Prime Minister about the role and employment contract awarded to consultant and former adviser John Garnaut. It’s already kicked off calls that Carr be expelled from the Labor Party for his “disloyalty”.
Garnaut was in turn the subject of a front page report in yesterday’s Fairfax papers, regarding the the “aggressive interest” Chinese security officials reputedly took in him when grilling Australian-based dissident academic Chongyi Feng back in 2017.
Garnaut himself is not an academic, nor a career public servant — his primary source of expertise in China is his long career as a correspondent reporting from Beijing. Crikey took a look at the journey from Fairfax cadet to key figure in Chinese-Australian relations.
Impressive pedigree
John Garnaut is the son of academic Ross Garnaut, himself the possessor of an impressive resume. A distinguished professor of economics at the Australian National University and both a vice-chancellor’s fellow and professorial fellow of economics at The University of Melbourne, Garnaut Snr has been a senior economic adviser to prime minister Bob Hawke, Australia’s ambassador to China (where John lived with him for two years as a child) and chairman of BankWest. In 2007 he was appointed by state and territory governments to examine the impacts of climate change on the Australian economy.
Early career
Garnaut the Younger joined Fairfax as a cadet in 2002, after a three-year stint at commercial lawyers Hall and Wilcox. Within a year he was Fairfax’s economics editor in the Canberra press gallery and in 2007 he took up the role of China correspondent in Beijing.
China
Altogether Garnaut reported on China for Fairfax for eight years, graduating from correspondent to Asia Pacific editor in 2013, where he would stay for the remainder of his time in journalism. His work on China was credible and relatively measured — and it’s worth noting that for all the furore over Liberal MP Andrew Hastie’s decision to name Australian-Chinese businessman Chau Chak Wing as an unindicted co-conspirator in a US bribery case (while cloaked in parliamentary privilege), Garnaut was the first Australian journo to be sued by Chau when he did the same thing back in 2015.
Politics and analysis
Garnaut moved on to work for Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in 2015 as a senior adviser. In 2016 he was appointed to head the team compiling a report on the actions of the Chinese Communist Party on Australian democracy.
While “top secret”, the report is supposed to have found meddling by Chinese interests at every level of government. Along with the damning revelations aired by Fairfax and the ABC, it formed the basis for Turnbull’s sweeping foreign interference reforms announced late last year. Garnaut moved on from Turnbull’s direct employ in mid 2017, founding JG Global a consultancy group which advises governments and private companies on China.
It was in this capacity that Garnaut was called to testify at a US House committee hearing on “State and Non-State Actor Influence Operations” (apparently they have some interest in foreign influences on the process of democracy too…). No longer beholden to any notions of diplomacy, Garnaut was unsparing. He told the committee the CCP used “brazen and aggressive” tactics to influence foreign institutions and they “coerced and intimidated” dissenters overseas.
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