Australia should cooperate more closely with Taiwan enhance cybersecurity, bilateral trade and economic relations, Australian parliamentarians said on Wednesday.
They learned that Taiwan is one of the most frequently cyberattacked places in the world, said Julian Hill, a member of Australia’s ruling Labor Party and chair of Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit, during a media roundtable in Taipei.
“So, there’s a lot that Australia can learn from Taiwan,” he said.
Photo: CNA
“We are equally facing very significant amounts of cyberattacks, but this is where it is very important for like-minded countries and people to learn from each other,” he said.
Australian industrial bases are also being hit hard by cyberespionage, Hill said.
Australia primarily faces cyberattacks from China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, said Australian Representative Shayne Neumann, chair of the Parliamentary Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade.
There are existing exchanges between police forces in Taipei and Canberra regarding cybersecurity, said Andrew Wallace, a member of Australia’s Liberal Party.
“Cybersecurity is not necessarily just a national security issue, it also involves child sexual labor slavery... Those connections between our various police forces, the Australian Federal Police and the police in Taiwan are very important,” he added.
On the prospect of Taiwan and Australia signing a free-trade deal, Neumann said that Australia is pushing to sign a trade deal with the EU first, but added that he understands Taiwan’s desire to reach a trade deal.
Taiwan is Australia’s seventh-largest trading partner, and Australia is a main source of coal and natural gas imports for Taiwan, so the nation is important to Australia and both sides have been deepening trade arrangements for a long time, Neumann said.
His party is interested in exploring a closer economic relationship with Taiwan, given the size of the nation as a market and the fact that both countries are APEC members, Australian parliamentarian Dave Sharma of the Liberal Party said.
As for Australia’s take on Taiwan losing Pacific ally Nauru earlier this year, Sharma said that although it is Nauru’s decision to make, based on its sovereign interests, Australia does “have an interest in ensuring that Taiwan retains some diplomatic space.”
It is important that there are still channels and avenues for dialogue with Taiwan from around the world, Sharma said, adding that it is why Australia supports Taiwan’s presence in international organizations.
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
RSS