There is an increasingly wild public relations battle underway in the Murdoch Press between notional Chinese and US interests. Late last week, The Australian launched the following attack on Bob Carr:
Over breakfast at Sydney’s plush Park Hyatt a mere 10 days after Bob Carr had been sworn in as foreign minister in 2012, Kurt Campbell, then a US assistant secretary of state, raised concerns about his closeness to China.
Washington-based sources have told The Australian that Campbell, dispatched by then secretary of state Hillary Clinton, was directed to take the fledgling foreign minister aside and caution him about his pro-China position and his criticism of Barack Obama’s 2011 pivot-to- Asia speech to the Australian parliament.
…Mr Carr’s relationship with China and his efforts to promote the interests of Australia’s largest trading partner, have again come under focus since his NSW ALP Right colleague Sam Dastyari was forced to resign after using $1650 from Chinese political donor Top Education Institute to pay an overspend in his senator’s office travel budget.
Senator Dastyari, who also used donor Chinese company Yuhu Group to pay a $5000 legal bill, put Mr Carr’s name forward in 2012 as the replacement for the retiring Mark Arbib, paving the way for him to become Gillard government foreign minister.
…Since leaving office, Mr Carr has assiduously promoted the Australia-China relationship as head of the Australia-China Relations Institute at the University of Technology Sydney and organised meetings between Chinese officials and politicians.
…Australian Strategic Policy Institute executive director Peter Jennings said generally public servants, particularly members of the Defence Force, who left their jobs to work for an industry organisation, allowed an extended period of time to lapse first.
“It’s not to suggest they have done anything improper,” Mr Jennings said. “I think we should just remember that he was in a position of great responsibility with completely open access to Australian intelligence,” he said.
Mr Jennings said the extent to which Mr Carr softened Australia’s position on China has not been widely understood in the Australian community.
“I think he invested too much time as foreign minister in having the concern of how things will be read in Beijing rather than just setting out what was an expression of Australia’s national interest,” he said.
Mr Carr responded over the weekend:
It was September 2013 and, representing Australia at the G20 in St Petersburg, I had the honour of getting up and telling the US President he had Australia’s support. As I noted in my diary, I was cast in something of a traditional Australian role in backing our ally. This and at least six other examples of cordial support for the US were carefully censored from the account served up by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s right-wing executive director Peter Jennings to reporter Sharri Markson…
These two collaborators also censored from their article those occasions when I disagreed with the Chinese. In Beijing in May 2012, then foreign minister Yang Jiechi criticised the rotation of US marines in Darwin. I told him bluntly the US alliance was in Australia’s DNA, part of our history. It’s in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade record.
In mid-2012, Julia Gillard was proposing annual dialogues with Chinese leaders. The Chinese seemed to enjoy keeping us waiting for a response. I said we were relaxed.The Australian’s foreign editor Greg Sheridan wrote on August 23: “This is the right tone for Canberra with Beijing — positive, constructive but ultimately unruffled and unintimidated.” According to another diary entry, I was even ready to treat the relationship with “benign neglect”.
A balanced account would have quoted my diary entry of August 14, 2012, saying Australia’s pro-China lobby was “over-egging the pudding”. I also challenged a Paul Keating-Hugh White reference about “giving China strategic space”, asking myself, “What would this mean?”
By the way, when Sheridan reviewed my diary he was far more perceptive than Markson-Jennings: “Carr has a dialogue with himself, all the way through the book, about the proper balance of Australian policy between the US and China. He accepts the nearly universal Australian support for the US alliance. He accepts its contribution to Australian security. He believes in the future of the alliance, as well as its past.”
One year after the marines decision, the US had no appetite for another raft of strategic initiatives. It was Defence secretary Dennis Richardson, former DFAT secretary and ambassador to the US, who suggested the 2012 AUSMIN meeting in Perth could be described as “steady as she goes”. The Americans agreed. This was not a Carr frolic. It was the considered Australia-US position.
There was absolutely no occasion when Kurt Campbell, whom Hillary Clinton appointed as US assistant secretary of state, criticised Australia for working at relations with Beijing or anyone remarked on my links as NSW premier with the Chinese community. Those links were unremarkable, probably less intimate than those of more recent premiers.
The media conflict surrounding Bob Carr has now morphed into a pointless pissing contest. Carr’s institute has cut funding and management ties with the dodgy Chinese money that was backing it and that is really all that can be asked of it. If Mr Carr wants to keep disseminating Chinese sympathetic views on his own dime then it’s a free country.
The Bob Carr ACRI episode is more useful to the extent that it helps define the key foreign policy question before Australia:
- that Australia must seek to balance extant economic forces in its relationship with Beijing against extant strategic imperatives in its relationship with he US;
- these forces are not of the future, they are now. Australia has already been swept into the embrace of Chinese economic imperialism given it is our number one commodities and services export partner;
- this is still counter-balanced by a strong strategic relationship with the US but if the economic integration proceeds further (and it will on current policies) then Australia will lose foreign policy independence not to the US but to China.
Exactly how much economic risk can one country take on one partner before it loses an independent foreign policy? China is already 28.8% of our exports:
Chinese investment is much smaller but not as small as it appears:
Belgium is not a renowned investor in Australia but it is a notorious conduit for Chinese capital. We can confidently add a large portion of that to China’s official total, pushing it into third place.
It is easy enough to observe how Australian foreign policy has already diverged from its previous course owing to its China dependency. It was not much more than decade ago when human rights were a key component of the bilateral exchange. But economic imperative has now buried that forever and the words ‘Tiananmen’, ‘Tibet’ and probably ‘Taiwan’ as well have been excised from the Australian lexicon. Australia supports China’s bids for stronger representation in pretty much every major mutli-lateral economic forum, including China’s own competitor to the World Bank. That’s fair enough given its economic clout but each of these also pushes back US power.
The key question now, then, is not whether we need independence from the US to continue this engagement. It is how far does the engagement run before it impinges on the independence we have enjoyed vis the US strategic relationship? To date we’re OK but Australia’s current economic model, and its mushrooming reliance upon “citizenship” exports as the key driver of growth, intrinsically relies upon the import of much greater quantities of Chinese capital and people across all sectors: sovereign, private and household. It is no coincidence that the recent bribery scandals have emanated exclusively from this sector. It will drive Australia into a Chinese economic block within which independent strategic policy will be impossible to sustain.
That is fair enough if you trust China to be a balanced and rules-based hegemon with objectives similar to those that have been pursued (for the most part) by Anglopshere powers for a century. But that is a pretty wild leap of faith given the Communist Party of China has shown a ruthless commitment to power retention above even the lives of its own people throughout its reign.
That is not to say Australia should suddenly back away from China. It most definitely should not. What we need is a mix of policies that enable engagement without defacto economic occupation. That is why MB proposes the duel trading relationship with China in which investment into raw materials (including agribusiness) that can contribute to China’s peaceful development is welcomed. But investment into sovereign, strategic and household assets that create a circumstance of policy suasion is prevented, including lowering the overall immigration intake and properly policing foreign buying of housing.
It is a viable path forward that preserves our prosperity and power status between both our Great and Powerful friends.
