Business industry leaders with dealings in China, including the Australia China Business Council (ACBC), whose major sponsors include Qantas, ANZ, Huawei, Telstra and Rio Tinto, have also criticised Mr Hastie's position.

ACBC chief executive Helen Sawczak said the comments were "unhelpful for the Australia China business community", which has just achieved $215 billion in two-way trade.

"Australia has enjoyed 28 years of uninterrupted economic growth, due in large part to our strong relationship with China," Ms Sawczak said.

"Our members are understandably concerned by potentially damaging comments by lone MPs which do not necessarily reflect the views of the government or the business community," she said.

"Business is keen to continue to have a positive relationship with China."

Huawei loses confidence

Huawei Australia chairman John Lord also criticised the comments, saying he was "a little surprised that a chairman of such an important government committee would make statements like that, because chairmen are meant to be unbiased".

"China’s growing and that causes concerns among some people," Mr Lord said.

"We’ve been sucked up into the Cold War."

Mr Lord has now admitted he has lost confidence in the Chinese behemoth's ability to overturn the government's ban on its involvement in high-speed mobile networks, and is prepared to lay off staff.

In August 2018 the Turnbull government banned Huawei from providing telcos with equipment for Australia's 5G roll out, citing national security grounds.

Four years earlier, the Gillard government had also banned the Chinese kit giant from participating in the National Broadband Network infrastructure tenders.

The Chinese telco giant has since accused Australian policymakers of "xenophobia" and criticised them for making the decision on the basis of politics rather than concerns about the technology, arguing aggressively that the decision should be changed.

Despite this lobbying effort, Mr Lord conceded he is "not confident" that the government will change its mind, though said it was Huawei's job to continue fighting for a better outcome.

"The 5G decision hurt us because we’ve seen how NBN didn’t turn out as good as it could have been ... 5G is going to be like that eventually," he said.

Mr Lord said he was concerned about the future of technology jobs in Australia and within the company.

"We have some highly skilled people in jobs in Australia and they’re going to lose those," he said, adding that while the 4G side of the business continued to operate, the company would need to restructure its workforce around wireless.

"Australia is losing high tech jobs, Huawei is a company that can bring technology in ... we create jobs, we’ve gone from five people in 2004 to over 700. Most of those are engineers," he said.

"It’s painful for us just not being in 5G generally."

However, he stopped short of saying Huawei would back out of the Australian market, saying that the business was "not going anywhere".

Communications Minister Paul Fletcher ruled out any plans to weaken the ban on Huawei in July.

Outgoing secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Martin Parkinson, said the solution was not to "throw up a barrier between China and non-China in every area" but to work out the areas of concern.

He said the government was commonly accused of making the 5G decision in concert with other countries, which he said was "complete nonsense".

"We took that decision before any other country in our own interest, we did the work ourselves, we took the decision, we moved on. It’s other people who are upset about that," he said.

"Our position on the issues [around 5G] is clear. We are not standing around using a megaphone yelling at anybody. Issues will just get resolved over time, quietly as they always do."