Jeez, the future is going to be fun:
ZTE, the Chinese telecommunications company bidding for major contracts in Australia, and at the centre of Donald Trump’s trade war with Beijing, was established partly as a front for military intelligence and has been linked to corruption in 18 countries, according to explosive court documents filed in the US.
The previously unseen court filings, document how ZTE handed over “brown paper bags” of cash to win contracts in Africa, building on an earlier report by Fairfax Media showing institutionalised corruption within the Chinese company.
ZTE has been shortlisted to build Telstra’s 5G mobile phone network in Australia and is one of two bidders vying to provide a new communications system for Perth’s rail network, despite long-held national security concerns about the company.
And from David Crowe:
Imagine the scenario at the next federal election when a foreign power seeks to wield its influence to help a friend or punish an enemy in the Australian parliament.
An Australian politician could easily collect donations from a wealthy patron close to a foreign government in exchange for influence over policy. A foreign government could use its muscle with ethnic media to wage a vendetta against an elected MP. A donor to a political party could shape its policy while hiding his or her link to a foreign agency.
…Parliament will act on this problem within weeks – and it is about time it did so. The overseas experience has proven that tougher laws are needed before the next Australian election. The foreign interference laws will expose the influence trade to greater transparency. One change will make it a criminal offence to influence a political or government process in a way that is covert or involves deception. The penalty will be imprisonment for 20 years.
These are drastic sanctions but a consensus is forming across the two major parties to get the changes legislated by June 21. Opposition Leader Bill Shorten is not making this a partisan issue. This is a pragmatic decision after Labor divisions were exposed on two fronts over the past fortnight [Hastie and Carr].
The effect over the past fortnight was to encourage Labor to wake up to the danger of playing politics on foreign interference and China in particular.
About bloody time. This is only the beginning of this soft power war. To win we will need a revolution in policy.
China is not what we hoped it would become when we took the trade handshake a dozen years ago. It is not liberalising. It is going to other way, into dictatorship. Yet it is still growing in eminence and power projection, so we are forced to construct a new way to deal with it.
China sees its role in the world as manifest destiny with a total claim over the ethnic Chinese imagination without borders. It must therefore be dealt with equally comprehensively. Our response should have three dimensions to it. The astute among you will see that these three steps actually work hand-in-glove with one another.
First, our economy must seek balance. To achieve that we will need a raft of new policies that aim to improve Australian competitiveness and get us out from under the commodity dependence. This is necessary anyway as China slows and changes and wants less dirt. We must reform energy, banking, and real estate to lower the currency, boost productivity and move from urbanisation growth drivers to tradables.
Second, we must engage strategically and diplomatically across our entire region. ASEAN is a natural partner to hedge Chinese influence. The Quadrilateral is also useful in bringing together allies. The US alliance must be constantly tended and revitalised. The Pacific must be treated as the good friend and partner that it is with significant aid and bilateral economic exchange, not the usual afterthought.
Third, Australian politics and society must be prepared and shielded to contain excessive Chinese Communist Party influence. This can easily be achieved via bans on foreign (or all) donations to political parties and the introduction of a federal ICAC. Society, too, is easy enough to protect if we have the will. There is no need, nor desire, for discrimination. We simply cut the permanent migration intake in half. It needs to be done anyway to take pressure off the east coast crush-loading. We should eschew both the cultural chauvinists of the Coalition and the “Asianising” influences within Labor. We are a multicultural democracy with liberal Anglophone roots. Let’s accept and protect it.
Thus, the state of affairs between Australia and China as they are is naturally one of tension. That doesn’t mean we can’t be pragmatic and friendly trading partners. Of course we can. But the period of calm we’ve enjoyed for a decade was a paid-for illusion during which we took the bribe and pretended it wouldn’t come with costs. It does. It jeopardises our democracy. It is finished. Let’s not bring it back.
Instead, let’s deal with things as they are so we don’t wake in fright one day to find the myriad children of the Lucky Country are born into something altogether less young and free.
