This is consistent with what has gone on in other countries. In a notorious case Californian congressman Eric Swalwell was targeted by CCP operatives, including one who allegedly had an affair with him, when he was at the start of his political career as a member the Dublin City Council (the suburban local government area in California, not Dublin Ireland).
As the Victorian agreement to participate in the belt-and-road initiative illustrates, these activities have the potential to implicate sub-national governments in arrangements inconsistent with national objectives and priorities, taking advantage of the former's naivete in international relations.
The book is an edited collection of articles on CCP activities in each state, as well as the universities and business. It is a free download from the site linked to below. Well worth getting a copy to gain a comprehensive picture of the threat to Australian sovereignty and democratic institutions posed by this increasingly totalitarian regime.
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Contemporary Australia–China relations are deep, diverse and many tiered, involving engagements across all levels of government and among different parts of society. Relations are far from symmetrical. China is a great power—huge, populous, powerful and wealthy—while Australia is a modest middle power and, on most measures, more heavily dependent on China than China is upon Australia. Still, bilateral relations proceed on the assumption spelled out over 250 years ago that ‘a dwarf is as much a man as a giant, a small republic is no less a sovereign state than the most powerful kingdom.’ Relations might not be symmetrical but they’re founded on the principle that all states are equally sovereign.
In normal times, asymmetry in wealth and power need not matter a great deal. The international state system is founded on the principle of the equal sovereignty of nations, irrespective of their relative wealth and power, and the underlying architecture governing trade and investment among market economies has been relatively stable since the end of World War II. These aren’t normal times. Early in the 21st century, China moved to secure a place in the international order commensurate with its growing wealth and power, as it had every right to do. Since Xi Jinping’s appointment as General Secretary of the CCP and President ofthe People’s Republic of China (PRC), however, his government has sought to destabilise the international order itself by militarising contested territorial claims in the region, rolling out the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to yield leverage over other countries, using relative trade dependence for strategic purposes, setting new rules for the region, and positioning itself in the UN to rewrite the postwar rules for the world.
Further, under Xi Jinping China has ceased to be a normal state actor. It seeks to translate massive advantages in wealth and power into asymmetries in sovereignty by interfering in the domestic affairs of other states. Where it does that at the local (or subnational) level, its effort is structured to bring national heft to local engagements in ways that Australia’s federated state sand territories aren’t able to.