Opposition Leader Bill Shorten has ordered Labor senator Sam Dastyari to resign from his parliamentary responsibilities following another day of damaging reports about his dealings with businessman and political donor Huang Xiangmo.
Senator Dastyari will quit his positions as deputy opposition whip in the Senate, and as chair of a committee, but remain in the Parliament.
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Dastyari told to resign
Labor leader Bill Shorten has asked Sam Dastyari to resign from his senior positions over his connections to a Chinese businessman.
His demotion follows Fairfax Media's revelation that the New South Wales senator warned the Chinese Communist Party-linked political donor last year that his phone was likely tapped by government agencies, including the US government.
Before the two spoke, Senator Dastyari gave Mr Huang counter-surveillance advice, saying they should leave their phones inside and go outside to speak.
The face-to-face meeting between the pair in the grounds of Mr Huang's Mosman mansion in Sydney last October came several weeks after Senator Dastyari quit the frontbench over his dealings with Mr Huang.
It also occurred after ASIO briefed senior political figures, including from the Labor Party, that Mr Huang was of interest to the agency over his opaque links to the Chinese government.
Audio obtained by Fairfax and released late on Wednesday revealed that Senator Dastyari had delivered a deliberate and detailed defence of China's position in the South China Sea in mid-2016, in defiance of Labor policy.
Weeks after that speech was first reported, and amid fierce scrutiny about why the rising star of the ALP had contradicted Australia's bipartisan foreign policy on Beijing's aggressive territorial claims, Senator Dastyari suggested his comments were off the cuff.
"Now I'm not going to be the first or the last backbench Member of Parliament to have taken a foreign policy question they shouldn't have taken, mumbled it and answered it incorrectly," he told the ABC's Australian Story.
Mr Shorten said this "mischaracterisation" of those comments had made the senator's position untenable.
"Last night I spoke to Senator Sam Dastyari and told him to resign from his senior Labor positions in the Senate. It is not a decision I took lightly," the Opposition Leader said in a statement.
"I also told him that while I accept his word that he never had, nor disclosed, any classified information, his handling of these matters showed a lack of judgment."
Senator Dastyari was forced to resign from the frontbench late last year because of earlier revelations concerning his relationship with Mr Huang and statements on the South China Sea. After setting out to rehabilitate his political image, he was given the deputy whip position in February.
Fairfax Media understands Thursday's demotion will see Senator Dastyari's pay cut by about $10,000.
On Wednesday, Coalition ministers had described his position in Parliament as untenable and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull questioned if the Labor factional player had betrayed Australia.
Attorney-General George Brandis told Sky News on Thursday morning that Senator Dastyari and Mr Shorten still had questions to answer.
"Senator Dastyari has said in the past, 'Oh I made a few ill-chosen words, I garbled my speech'. We now know, having heard the audio, that these were considered, evidently scripted remarks that were delivered for the quite advertent purpose of sending a message through the Chinese media which was the opposite of the declared Labor Party policy in relation China and the South China Sea by the then shadow defence minister, senator Stephen Conroy," he said.
"I've seen this film before," Defence Minister Marise Payne said, following the announcement that Senator Dastyari would lose his parliamentary positions.
"And the last time it happened, Senator Dastyari was back in a position of authority in the Australian Labor Party, in the Australian Parliament, five months later. So really Mr Shorten needs to provide a fuller explanation of this situation and what he intends to do about it," Senator Payne said.
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