Black Hole Malcolm crops himself from Huang photo

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Get a load of Australia’s McCarthyism circus:

Labor’s Tony Burke uses a prop to question Malcom Turnbull about cropping himself out of a photo his media team distributed yesterday showing Bill Shorten with controversial Chinese donor Huang Xiangmo.

Burke showed the full photo which also had both the Prime Minister and the Opposition Leader with Mr Huang.

Then this:

Labor’s Mark Dreyfus reads a quote of praise from former trade minister Andrew Robb about Huang Xiangmo.

Malcolm Turnbull says Mr Robb – who controversially took a job with a Chinese billionaire immediately after he left parliament – “always put Australia first”.

“There is a big difference between Andrew Robb and Senator Dastyari is that Andrew Robb always put Australia first. Senator Dastyari sold Australia out,” he says.

As far as we could see, Robb’s behaviour was borderline treasonous, only his price was higher. Recall from The Australian:

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Former trade minister Andrew Robb has criticised Australia’s failure to engage with Asia even as it seeks greater trade access in the region, and defended Chinese ­investment in Australia.

Mr Robb, who several months ago was appointed to advise Chinese-owned Landbridge Group which operates Darwin Port, questioned the “hand-wringing about Chinese investment” in Australia during a speech to honour former governor-general Zelman Cowen at Melbourne’s Australia Institute of International Affairs last night.

He singled out as “demonstrably wrong” warnings by former Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens that “foreign capital that buys up existing assets … is not creating new capital for the country, it just alters the allocation of who owns the capital that’s here now”.

“Most state and federal government privatisations over recent decades have very large foreign ­investment components,” Mr Robb said. “For that matter the sale of any asset to investors from other countries means the Australian seller can reinvest in creating new assets.”

Australia had never been able to fully finance the maintenance and expansion of many existing industries or the development of new greenfields projects, he said.

“Security issues aside, we should welcome new foreign investment and absolutely resist putting more barriers in the way,’’ he said.

While Australia had profited hugely from Asia’s exploding middle class “our cultural awareness is meagre, our Asian language skills are largely non-existent, and our investment levels in the region embarrassing”.

What is embarrassing is having a very recent former trade minister on the payroll of a dubious and secretive Chinese firm pointing the finger at the rest of us for not selling out.

Until February this year Robb was Australia’s trade minister having just negotiated the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement. He was a member of parliament until 2 July. And yet he took a job at China’s Landbridge Group – equipped with still fresh insider knowledge and “five eyes” intelligence – just two months later (while collecting a parliamentary pension).

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Then there are the strategic implications, the AFR has more:

Former trade minister Andrew Robb, who has been criticised for taking a job with Darwin Port owners Landbridge, led a delegation of Australian government officials to Beijing to convince them of the benefits of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s signature strategic “One Belt One Road” policy last week.

…Landbridge’s Darwin Port interests and the One Belt One Road policy are intertwined.

Landbridge head Ye Cheng has previously said the company’s investment in the Northern Territory port helped serve the Chinese strategic and foreign policy goal, also known as the “Maritime Silk Road”, enthusiastically touted by Chinese leaders as a way to connect China with Europe via Central Asia via massive Chinese investment in new infrastructure projects

Sceptics say the policy it is an attempt by Beijing to create a strategic bloc to counter the influence of the United States.

Mr Xi has called for the Australian government’s Northern Development Strategy to be included in the initiative, which the Chinese government say is worth billions.

Mr Robb helped launch and is on the advisory board of the organisation that arranged last week’s China trip – the Australia China One Belt One Road Initiative – in May when he was still Trade Envoy, along with former Victorian Labor premier John Brumby.

This is a clear breach of the statement of ministerial standards, which states that ministers should not lobby or advocate with the government for 18 months after their political retirement, nor take personal advantage of information to which they had access in their ministerial role.

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It is also a violation of Australia’s strategic outlook which already has US Marines rotating through Darwin to help police the region, even as Andrew Robb sells out its assets to interests with clear links to Chinese sovereign objectives.

About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.