“The biggest single problem is that a lot of Australians have not done their homework, they have not done the hard yards to get their head around what the Chinese are doing and what they are saying,” says Ross Babbage, a former analyst with the Office of National Assessments. “A lot of people assume we’re looking at a benign power. We are not.”

However, Ross Babbage, a former senior intelligence official, told The Australian Financial Review’s Aaron Patrick this week that Dastyari “may have been recruited as an agent of influence”. This means that Beijing looks to him as someone who will help to increase China’s influence in Australia. No more than that — but this is important in itself.

Ross Babbage, a former Office of National Assessments analyst and senior fellow at the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment in Washington, said Beijing’s security services were conducting a far-reaching campaign to ­influence and shape opinion in the West.

“There is a strategy to recruit and insert and encourage, and to some extent fund, agents of ­influence,’’ Professor Babbage told The Weekend Australian. “We have not seen this type of activity in Australia since the Cold War.’’

"China has certainly been active, essentially campaigning for political influence here," he told ABC Radio. "It has been involved in a raft of indirect activities through a range of business people, some of whom are ethnic Chinese, some of whom are not."

Dr Ross Babbage, who is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, says activities already being undertaken by foreign powers in this country have made the crackdown necessary.

"There is evidence that he may have been recruited as an agent of influence," said Ross Babbage, a former head of strategic analysis at the Office of National Assessments, the government's peak intelligence adviser. "That's my belief."