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Comment by IIAOPSW | Hacker News Reader

This honestly makes me suspicious. Arm of government says opposition of current government is corrupted. How convenient.

I don't know if ASIO is/isn't/could be weaponized as a political tool or if the sort of person that ends up there can/does use their position to push their personal politics. But it is plausible that it happens and by the nature of the organization such a hypothesis can't really be scrutinized.

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ASIO has levelled claims against people connected to government ministers as well e.g. Gladys Liu.

Australia doesn't have the same level of deep bipartisanship that exists in the US so I wouldn't assume that our intelligence agency is a political tool.

It's a bit of a win-win for China, either they corrupt the Labor party or they get caught sow suspicion against the Labor party

will you say the same if ASIO can table the evidence that a particular candidate is really having relationship or funded by Chinese?

Do you really want Australia heavily depending on China like what happened in Australia previously?

I'm going to go with a slightly higher bar. It is perfectly plausible that these particular candidates really do have some relation or funding from the PRC. But can you say for sure that ASIO doesn't systematically fail to scrutinize the connections and funding of Liberal party politicians?

The inherent problem with what I've said is that its a very plausible and precedented thing for a spy organization to do, but it is also a fundamentally untestable hypothesis because you can't really scrutinize the work of spies. So the state of reality where ASIO is earnestly fighting corruption looks the same as the state of reality where ASIO are a political tool. How can you be certain which reality you are in?

>This honestly makes me suspicious. Arm of government says opposition of current government is corrupted. How convenient

Didn't this happen during Obama's presidency, when Hillary and Trump were running?

No, I recall a bunch of suspicious meetings between Trump, his sons, his close confidants and known Russian intelligence assets (keep in mind that includes people like ambassadors) that they lied about having happened until we were presented with evidence that they did, at which point they tried to downplay them.

That's my recollection at least.

Yes. And those accusations were true. And, quite possibly, these Australian accusations are also true. It may or may not be a convenient truth, or a truth withheld until a convenient time, or a similar truth about the other party might also be known to be true but not released. Or maybe Labour really is the more corrupt party and ASIO are earnestly working to protect Australian interests. All of these hypothesis are congruent with the evidence.

There's a difference between being skeptical of politically convenient press releases versus being a contrarian that just assumes anything politically convenient must be a lie.

>> Didn't this happen during Obama's presidency, when Hillary and Trump were running?

> Yes. And those accusations were true.

What's the rundown on this scandal? A link or TL;DR is fine -- not trying to derail.

Hard to come up with a tldr on what is an extremely complicated scandal (just take a look at how long the knowyourmeme page is on Russiagate).

Here is a pretty up to date summary, though, if a bit partisan: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/12/08/why_th...

Maybe you have reply notifications: this seemed like the closest thing (not close at all, I'm afraid) you'd get to both a complete list, and not having to dig through multiple rants.

https://themillenniumreport.com/2016/10/the-top-100-most-dam...

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