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Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton has today excitedly joined the man that ended up becoming Prime Minister when he wanted to become Prime Minister to excitedly announce a new spy taskforce to do all the shit he hasn’t been able to do in his current job, because he’s not very good at it.
The Federal Government plans to spend almost $88 million to establish a new Counter Foreign Interference Taskforce.
The Taskforce will be a completely new agency, aimed at doing all the stuff that Dutton should have been doing if he wasn’t so caught up with deporting rural abattoir workers and fast-tracking visas for young European women so they can keep working as Au Pairs for Liberal Party donors.
The taskforce will expand the resources of the National Counter Foreign Interference Coordinator — which sits within the Home Affair Department — to help “disrupt and deter anyone attempting to undermine our national interests by being smarter than Peter Dutton”
The taskforce will be led by a senior Australian Security Intelligence Organisation officer, who is much more competent than Peter Dutton, who has only ever worked as a highway cop before entering politics in his twenties, and will include investigators from the Australian Federal Police and staff from a range of security agencies.
The Government intends for it to increase intelligence collection, assessment, law enforcement capabilities and collaboration and decision-making between agencies to result in more disruptions of possible interference.
It comes amid heightened national security concerns raised by allegations of Chinese espionage, influence over political parties and multiple cyber attacks on universities and federal agencies.
Shortly before retiring earlier this year, outgoing ASIO director-general Duncan Lewis said foreign interference presented a greater threat than terrorism. Which is saying a lot, because Peter Dutton has somehow been able to justify women and children dying of preventable illness and torture in offshore detention in the name of saving Australia from terrorism.
The taskforce comes a week after it was revealed Chinese man Wang Liqiang was seeking political asylum in Australia after going public with allegations about Chinese spying.
During questions at the end of the conference Prime Minister Morrison somehow confused Wang Liqiang with another Asian person in his briefing notes.
It is not yet known if this agency will be spending that much time investigating how Peter Dutton is also believed to have pulled strings for a high ranking Chinese Communist Government official, after having lunch with him in a private room in Sydney’s Chinatown after they paid a dodgy lawyer $20,000 to organise the meeting.
However, judging by the lack of accountability that Dutton has faced the countless times he has asked unethically or illegally by abusing his power an elected official, probably not.
