You’ve really got to wonder how much influence the Chinese government is exerting on the National party these days?
Last month it was revealed that the Minister of Housing, Nick Smith, had demolished state houses then sold the public land they were on to a private Chinese owned company. The New Zealand government then helped pay to build privately owned houses to accommodate Chinese government workers from China Southern Airlines.
Then on Tuesday a documentary by Bryan Bruce called Who owns New Zealand now showed that our housing crisis has partly been driven by Chinese government backed speculation in our property market. Bruce also revealed how the National led government was hiding statistics on the exact number of properties being sold to foreign speculators.
But if that wasn’t bad enough, now we learn that a government MP, Jian Yang, was a card-carrying member of the Chinese Communist Party and taught spies at a Chinese military intelligence academy before moving to New Zealand to join the National party.
Yesterday, Newsroom reported:
National MP trained by Chinese spies
A National Party MP who studied at an elite Chinese spy school before moving to New Zealand has attracted the interest of our Security Intelligence Service.
The list MP Jian Yang did not mention in his work or political CVs a decade he spent in the People's Liberation Army-Air Force Engineering College or the Luoyang language institute run by China's equivalent of the United States National Security Agency.
That agency, the Third Department, conducts spying activities for China.
Clearly there’s a huge conflict of interest here, with the former teacher of Chinese spies having access to some of New Zealand’s most top-secret and highly sensitive information.
Perhaps this is why National is against taxing bottled water? After all, most of the consents for one of our most precious resources are in order to ship it off to China.
Newsroom has been told that to have taught at the Air Force Engineering College, Yang would have almost certainly been an officer in Chinese military intelligence and a member of the Communist Party, as other students and staff have been.
Surely that would preclude him from being an MP in New Zealand then?
Yang studied and then taught there before moving to Australia where he attended the Australian National University in Canberra. He migrated to this country to teach international relations in the politics department at the University of Auckland.
He was hand-picked by National Party president Peter Goodfellow to become an MP on its list in 2011, wooed directly by the former Prime Minister John Key and has been a key fundraiser for National among the Chinese community in Auckland.
So the National party actually headhunted Yang, a person who worked at a foreign spying academy, to be one of their MPs. Could you imagine the media frenzy if the Labour party had done something as unbelievably stupid as that?
As an MP he variously served on Parliament's Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade (from 2014 until last year), Commerce, Transport and Industrial Relations and Health and Science select committees and is prominent in New Zealand's interactions with the Chinese community and diplomatic and consular missions in Wellington and Auckland. He remains a Parliamentary Private Secretary for ethnic affairs.
It’s becoming pretty evident that the National party is in the pocket of the Chinese government. Even if you're a Chinese national, you'll likely realise that such things are entirely unconstitutional.
Bill English should do the right thing and stand Jian Yang down while an investigation is undertaken. The Prime Minister must somehow confirm to voters that National policy hasn't been influenced by another sovereign state. If the National party doesn't do that before the election, then it's time to change the government.
