Senate Hopeful Faces Questions Over Previous Legal Work for Huawei Australia

Nick Xenophon speaks to the press in the Adelaide Hills town of Stirling on July 3, 2016. (Brenton Edwards/AFP via Getty Images)

Former South Australian Senator Nick Xenophon is busy defending his previous role providing legal work—and occasional public advocacy—on behalf of Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei.

Xenophon announced a week earlier that he would be running for the Australian Senate against former colleague Rex Patrick, who took Xenophon’s place when he retired from Parliament in 2017.

The former senator’s law firm, Xenophon Davis, was contracted by Huawei Australia to provide legal advice, during this time, Xenophon also publicly stated Huawei had been “unfairly maligned” following its ban from Australia’s 5G network in 2018 over security concerns.

On April 3, Xenophon said Huawei Australia was a separate business from its parent company in China, pointing out that it had a separate board.

“[Former Foreign Affairs Minister] Alexander Downer, and John Brumby—the former Labor premier of Victoria—were key members of that board in years gone by,” he told Sky News Australia. “The business in Australia was confined to issues of 5G in relation to matters about their Australian operations.”

Advertising for Huawei Experience Store Opening in Sydney's Hurstville on Sept. 24, 2020. (Epoch Times)

“Interestingly, [Former Prime Minister] Malcolm Turnbull in his autobiography actually said they found the company did nothing wrong in Australia from a national security perspective,” he added. “But there was concern about what could happen down the track because the company is headquartered in China. I respect that.”

Xenophon maintained that he supported the bipartisan approach to dealing with foreign policy and Beijing, which has seen the Australian government take a tougher approach to foreign interference, and defence against Beijing.

In late March, his former colleague Patrick compared Xenophon’s tenure working for Huawei to that of “choosing to do PR work for the German companies Krupp or Messerschmitt in 1938.”

Both companies worked for the Nazi regime in Germany in the lead-up to World War II.

“Xenophon now says that he has not worked for Huawei for some time, though we don’t know when he ceased. He now claims to support the Australian government’s 5G ban on Huawei,” Senator Patrick told Parliament.

“As a declared Senate candidate, he should now, in the interests of transparency and accountability, disclose the full details of his contractual relationship with Huawei.”

Xenophon called the comparisons to the Nazis “pretty terrible” and downplayed the need to be registered on the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme.

“Doing legal work for Huawei does not need to be on the foreign registry. It’s as simple as that,” he said. “The foreign registry is all about making sure people don’t do things covertly, where people don’t know who they’re actually representing.”

Australia-China relations have become a much talked about issue in the current election race, notably with governing Coalition MPs lambasting the centre-left Labor Party for its handling of defence issues, particularly its record on defence spending—which reached a historically low 1.56 percent of GDP.

The treatment of the late Labor Senator Kimberley Kitching over her conservative-leaning policy position and her vocal criticisms of Beijing also drew the ire of fellow party members.

More recently, Coalition Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells claimed she experienced similar pressure from Liberal Party MPs for taking a strong stance on the Chinese Communist Party.