Bill Shorten says he doesn't trust Dastyari's judgment – but he is no threat to security
The Labor leader, Bill Shorten, has acknowledged that he doesn’t currently trust the judgment of the New South Wales senator Sam Dastyari but says he is not a risk to national security.
As Dastyari was ordered by the Senate on Thursday afternoon to provide a more comprehensive account of his contacts with Huang Xiangmo, a Sydney-based Chinese businessman, Shorten told reporters that, to the best of his knowledge, the senator had broken no laws and represented no threat to Australia’s national interest.
But the Labor leader again publicly castigated Dastyari, emphasising he had been stripped of his Senate positions and was now on a “long journey to rebuild trust”.
Shorten said he was deeply disappointed that Dastyari’s behaviour “has put me in a position where I have to sack him again” and he said Labor colleagues were “deeply, deeply frustrated with his very poor judgment”.
The Labor leader said he resented being put in a position of having to discipline Dastyari.
The government launched an assault on Dastyari throughout Thursday, with the prime minister declaring he must resign from the parliament.
But in his statement to the Senate, Dastyari said Huang, the businessman at the centre of the controversy, was a regular attendee at fundraisers for both the Liberal and Labor parties.
He said the last time he had contact with Huang was 12 months ago, during the face-to-face meeting reported by Fairfax Media earlier this week, in which he told the political donor his phone was probably being tapped by security agencies. The warning was reportedly made face-to-face, with phones left outside the room.
“I spoke to [Huang] to tell him that I did not think it was appropriate that we have future contact,” Dastyari told the Senate. “I thought it was a matter of common courtesy to say this face-to-face with Mr Huang. Neither my office or I have spoken to Mr Huang since.”
He said he utterly rejected any assertion “that I leaked intelligence information to Mr Huang”.
Dastyari said he had no intelligence to leak, because he had never been briefed “by any Australian security agency ever”.
He said he also accepted the fact that he had contradicted party policy on the South China Sea during a press conference with Huang present, and took responsibility for a subsequent mischaracterisation of what he said at the event.
Dastyari said he had accepted the consequences of the various missteps and resigned his Senate positions.
The statement to the Senate on Thursday did not address the substantive issue – why he had told Huang he was likely the subject of surveillance and why he had taken protective measures to avoid the conversation being recorded.
The Greens leader, Richard Di Natale, raised questions on Thursday about how the information about a private conversation between a senator and a Chinese businessman had come to light and wondered what if any role the government might have played.
The former Labor senator Stephen Conroy – who was the shadow defence minister at the time Dastyari contradicted the official policy on the South China Sea – told Sky News it took a “unique set of abilities to be sacked for the same thing twice”.
Conroy said it was a “fundamental mistake” and a “grave error of judgment” to go to Huang’s home and meet with him, and it also demonstrated very poor judgment to call a press conference for the Chinese media and publicly contradict Labor’s policy on the South China sea.
He said Dastyari, who entered politics from the organisational wing in New South Wales, had travelled “further and faster than perhaps was wise” with his advancement in the parliament, and it would be a long time before he would rehabilitate himself with colleagues.
Asked several times whether he trusted Dastyari, Conroy said he was a friend, and as a friend, he trusted him.