Australia has been known for some absurdly regressive policies when it’s come to COVID restrictions over the past couple of years, but now comes news they may be making progress on an international issue that concerns most of the free world.

The country’s Minister for Defence, Richard Marles, has announced they will be removing all Chinese-produced cameras from their government offices as they attempt to address concerns of spying.

On Wednesday, Australian Senator James Paterson revealed that an audit of government offices showed over 900 Chinese-produced devices were currently in use.

The audit found 913 devices, including cameras, access control systems and intercoms, made by Chinese-state owned enterprises Hikvision and Dahua, Paterson noted.

“These companies have a very close relationship with the Chinese Communist Party, and they are subject to China’s National Intelligence laws, which require all Chinese companies and individuals to secretly cooperate with Chinese intelligence agencies if requested,” Paterson said in a radio interview Wednesday.

“There have been vulnerabilities identified with these cameras in the past, where third parties could take full control over them and get the audio and video collected by them.”

The move comes after the Biden administration faced harsh criticism for allowing a Chinese spy balloon to travel the entire span of the United States last week. The balloon first entered American air space over Alaska and was only shot down after it reached the east coast.

The CCP has done nothing to lead Western nations to believe they have friendly intentions on any matter. With the spy balloon fiasco, it has become clear the communist nation is feeling dangerously secure in launching visible spy operations in the western hemisphere. They continue to buy hundreds of thousands of acres of U.S. farmland, have spyware installed on millions of American phones in the form of TikTok, and continue to provide to the West highly sensitive technology tools like microchips, security cameras and government vehicles – all of which can certainly be manipulated to collect and transmit valuable data pertinent to national security.

America should be following suit, and completing the job of disentangling from the CCP that President Trump began during his term in office. Perhaps Australia’s move will inspire other nations to follow with their own technology audits.