An Australian intelligence agency declared a year ago it was up to government departments whether to use equipment from Chinese companies Hikvision and Dahua, despite a new bipartisan push to remove such devices.
The advice from the Australian Signals Directorate was published in late 2021, at a time when the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, was defence minister.
This week the opposition called for action as it circulated new figures showing that at least 913 Hikvision and Dahua devices – including CCTV systems – were installed at more than 250 government sites across a range of departments.
The defence minister, Richard Marles, and the foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, vowed to ensure any such equipment was removed from their departments, while a wider review was also launched by the attorney general, Mark Dreyfus.
The opposition frontbencher James Paterson obtained the figures after asking individual government departments and he labelled the equipment “a unique national security risk to Australia”.
Paterson told the Australian newspaper: “We urgently need a plan from the Albanese government to rip every one of these devices out of Australian government departments and agencies.”
The opposition’s leader in the Senate, Simon Birmingham, told reporters the “existence of these cameras has been exposed thanks to questioning by my colleagues and by James Paterson”.
But Senate records show the late Labor senator Kimberley Kitching had raised concerns about government departments’ potential use of Hikvision and Dahua devices much earlier, when the Coalition was still in office.
Kitching asked ASD in November 2021 about a recommendation from the UK parliament’s foreign affairs committee that “equipment manufactured by companies such as Hikvision and Dahua should not be permitted to operate within the UK”, in part because of links to surveillance in Xinjiang.
She asked whether ASD had “provided advice to government or other departments on whether these companies should be prohibited from servicing the Australian government”.
ASD replied in December 2021: “Vendor choice is a matter for individual government departments and entities.”
But the agency added that it provided “technical advice and assistance, including supply chain guidance”.
At the time, Dutton’s ministerial responsibilities included ASD. It is routine for agencies’ responses to Senate questions to go to the relevant minister’s office for signoff.
Dutton and ASD were contacted for comment on Friday.
Despite this response, ASD had published an alert to the general public two months earlier warning that “a critical vulnerability exists in Hikvision products, including IP cameras, which could allow a cyber actor to take full control of the device”.
In the September 2021 alert, the agency urged any affected Australian customers to apply a firmware update provided by Hikvision.
And three years before that, the widespread use of such equipment by government departments was documented by an ABC investigation.
Paterson, the shadow minister for cyber security and countering foreign interference, said on Friday it was clear that “stronger advice should have been provided by all departments and agencies about the risks of these products”.
“Now that I have alerted the government to this risk they must act swiftly on it,” he said.
Paterson said he started his “audit” in September 2022, submitting questions to a range of federal government entities, after being alerted to the possibility they might be used by a number of departments.
He said he then became “particularly concerned when our closest security partners, the US and the UK, banned both companies in November 2022 and Australia failed to join them in doing so”.
The figures indicated 28 Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade sites were using such equipment. Wong said on Friday that she had asked her department “to accelerate the replacement of these cameras”.
“The advice to me is that they’re not connected to the internet, so there’s minimal security concerns, but obviously given what has happened in other countries it’s probably a good idea to do it,” Wong told ABC Adelaide.
The Adelaide Advertiser reported in 2018 that a Hikvision camera at the Edinburgh Royal Air Force base had been replaced.
But Marles said he had asked the Department of Defence “to engage in a further audit, just to make sure we’ve not missed any – and if there are any, they will be removed”.
“The idea that the Liberals are out there trying to make political hay on this really is a disgrace,” Marles said.
China’s foreign affairs ministry warned Australia against “erroneous practices of overstretching the concept of national security and abusing state power to discriminate against and suppress Chinese companies”.
“We hope the Australian side will provide a fair, just and non-discriminatory environment for the normal operation of Chinese companies and do more things that could contribute to mutual trust and cooperation between our two countries,” Mao Ning, a ministry spokesperson, said.
