 Hello, my name is Adam Ni. I'm a visiting fellow at the Strategic and Defense Study Center at the Australian National University. Here with me today is Professor Roger Bradbury. He is a professor at the National Security College here at the Australian National University and we're here to discuss the government's recent decision effectively banning Huawei and ZTE from the building of Australia's next generation 5G network. Welcome Roger. Thank you Adam, thank you. Thanks for being here with us today to talk about this really important issue that has been buried under the political circus that we've had over the last week. Could you just give us some background to the latest decision by the government to ban these Chinese telco giants? I think this has been a decision that's been a not a long time coming but it's been bubbling away for the last little while. There's a pervasive anxiety in the national security community both the government officials and the researchers in academia that Chinese technology companies don't behave as other companies do in the western world and there's a nagging feeling that they'll be used by their government the Chinese government to do bad stuff to us and so while it stingly veiled the decision as a decision without naming any companies it's very clear to anyone that's been watching this that it is targeted at the at the two big telcos or two big telecommunications and electronics companies ZTE and Huawei. Huawei has got a little bit of a little bit of a track record it's and people aren't have have caught it out once or twice in the past and I think the government's taking a cautious view about a cautious stance about how how we should handle this this issue into the future. Right and the government in making this announcement has cited national security concerns could you just give us some idea of what these national security considerations might be and how they might affect Australia's interests? Yeah to put it very plainly I think where the national security community is worried that because of the complexity of modern telecommunications hardware and software that it's easy relatively easy to put in what are called what people loosely refer to as back doors into the soft into into the systems where intelligence agencies can use get in get into the system quietly and listen and steal and and generally surveil and perhaps even do sabotage in one way or another in other words build the capacity to shut the system down should the telecommunications system down should that be that be a requirement at some time in the future so it's a so they're big ticket items we're talking about absolutely yes yeah and and and the anxiety is that that it's very hard for a Chinese company to assure Western customers that it that it's not in that it's not engaged in that the proof the the onus of proof unfortunately for them is on them and it's very hard for them to assure that that they're not engaged that they they can't be wittingly or unwittingly engaged in this process right and as you pointed out that um this decision while not naming these Chinese companies are thinly veiled excluding Chinese companies only from the 5G network is there anything special about Chinese company and the nature of the Chinese state that makes it more worrying than perhaps companies from other countries yeah I I think you have to you have to stand back and look at it and look at a larger picture of China and where it's going and its rise and its incredible development over the last over the last 20 or 30 years but but inside that development you need it it makes it look as if China is what what looking at it from the West we would say is a normal state that it has a rule of law it behaves in certain ways it and and and that it's and that the the firms and businesses inside the state are also like normal Western like normal Western or what we consider to be normal Western companies that are responsible to their shareholders and so on but that's not so China is a has a rule of law but the but the party a rule of law with small r and small l but the party sits over the top of that and ultimately and and ultimately the party can can change that rule of law at a at the stroke of a pen and companies must respond to that it's inconceivable that a Chinese company could say no to a request from a Chinese government agency to do something whereas a a Western company can they may end up in court fighting the government against something but but that's par for the course that doesn't happen in China so Chinese Chinese companies that can be used as agents of the interests of the Chinese state and those interests can include the need for intelligence the the sorts of intelligence operations which include surveillance ex-filtration of information and also sabotage or preparations for sabotage in time of in time of a crisis and ultimately this goes to the fundamental nature of the Chinese party state and how the Chinese Communist Party controls the whole system indeed and that it rules by law instead of have rule of law as we would like to think yeah now that's that that's a very good way a very good way to put it it's it sits it sits above the law whereas in Western societies the law sits above the politicians and the people in power in principle sometimes that stretched a little bit but broadly the systems operate differently and we need to recognize that a company like Huawei even though it looks like a normal international corporation is not right it's it operates under under different terms particularly on its home turf right and it seems to me that given so much attention on 5G and Huawei but this is only the the beginning of a long debate that we'll be having this country in relation to working with and importing technology from places like China where the political system is vastly different and where increasingly more events technology is coming from in terms of AI and autonomous technology and fintech so do you think that how would this debate develop in in the future do you have any inklings about that and how important is the current Huawei case to the future of Australia's technology technological progress I think the why this the Huawei issue that the decision has been made is a kind of a an exemplar issue and and it's going this is going to play out in into the medium term at least we've we're increasingly all countries are increasingly enmeshed with each other in terms of technology transfer and in terms of the supply chain of materials that go to make up modern life so bits and pieces are cobbled together from this country in that country and they're assembled finally assembled x y so assuring the supply chain and assuring the final product is going to become an increasingly difficult thing particularly when countries like China are involved in that as they will be so we have to we have to develop processes and and approaches that allow us to look to measure the risks in individual cases so a lot of it at least at least for the next little while is going to be on a case by case basis as we say do we take this new technology in what's what's the risk how do we assess it can we do it is there an alternative with with a lower risk and I think that's going to be the that's going to be the case and particularly with 5g 5g is the beginning of the next generation technology backbone absolutely for the not only for Australia but for the world and we want to make sure that the foundations of that process are solid and reliable and trustworthy and so we can't so in a sense the risk level we can accept for this part of the system is much the the level of risk we can't tolerate very much risk for this part we may be we may be have more we may be more risk happy for other parts of it but as we're building this next this the the next generation on which a whole lot of other other platforms I guess you might call them things to do with the internet of things are going to be built we need to be sure that we're building a solid a solid system whose risks we understand and in the sense that I get from you is that we're still in that kind of transition period where we're not really sure what to do with these cases Huawei in this case and 5g but increasingly down the track with other technology from China from Chinese companies with national security implications and that we're really in a flux and that this debate is going to be continuing for a long time yeah I think I think you're right we're not in a we're not in a an area of settled policy settled government policy it's it's responsive at the moment to particular events we're not in a we're not in a in an era of clarity about the way these supply chains work and the processes we need to put in place to assure them we don't have any of that we're not we're not in a place where we even understand what the what the full palette of new technologies will be that hang off all of this because they're changing very fast too so we're we're we're running to keep up with the technology change and we're we're sort of doing as as well as as best we can we saw we saw the the UK government some years ago have to as it were back engineer the arrival of Huawei into their system that's right and that that was presented to them as a fader complete by British Telecom which was a private company and they knew they knew nothing about it the British Telecom hadn't assessed the risks very well and the the government had to come in after the fact and try and and try and put a measure of confidence in in how and how these technologies worked work together the new technologies with the Huawei technology and that was that was a very fraught period for all including including Huawei they they weren't expecting this they they behaved at least in a commercial sense behaved properly did all the right things and suddenly they were being asked to to go a further step we're trying to sort of get on the front foot and get ahead of this problem absolutely yes by doing it this way absolutely well thanks very much Roger Bratbury for joining us today on this important issue and I think there's going to be a lot more debate going forward on Australia's technological future and how we can harness the benefits of technology while ensuring security so thank you very much well put thank you Adam