How an anti-gay Chinese community decided the 2016 election

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Cross-posted from The Saturday Paper’s Mike Seccombe:

Under the influence of religious conservatives, the vote of ethnic minorities won the 2016 election for the Coalition.

It’s a bold statement, but the evidence is there in the data, says Andrew Jakubowicz, professor of sociology at the University of Technology Sydney.

More specifically, he says, Malcolm Turnbull’s one-seat victory relied on wins in three electorates – Chisholm in Melbourne, and Banks and Reid in Sydney. These defied expectations in 2016, when the national voting trend ran strongly against the conservative parties.

In a contest that saw the Coalition government lose a net 14 seats, Chisholm was the only electorate the party won from Labor. Reid and Banks were the most important “holds”. And all three, Jakubowicz says, moved in a way they really ought not to have done “all else being normal”.

“I work on the basis that people more or less follow their socio-economic profile,” he says. “But these seats didn’t.”

The behaviour of these voters was a sociological puzzle for Jakubowicz. The solution he offers relies on three elements – ethnicity plus social conservatism plus religion – and it helps explain a great deal about this election campaign.

It provides the reason, for example, why no fewer than seven Labor MPs, including the opposition leader and three other senior frontbenchers all attached themselves to a policy announcement this week on a subject of little interest to most Australians.

It suggests why Scott Morrison attended a Maronite church in Sydney’s Punchbowl on Good Friday, and why the Liberal Party dusted off John Howard to wander the streets and offer a glowing endorsement of a candidate he had never met. And why Labor’s candidate against Gladys Liu in Chisholm is Jenny Yang.

Jakubowicz says that, in most ways, there was nothing to distinguish Chisholm, Banks and Reid from other electorates that followed the general anti-conservative trend in 2016.

Census data shows all three electorates enjoyed somewhat higher levels of educational attainment than average, but otherwise were unremarkable in terms of age and income and almost every demographic measure but one – all three are among Australia’s most ethnically diverse communities. According to the 2016 census, more than 56 per cent of residents in Reid were born overseas. In both Banks and Chisholm, it was almost 44 per cent.

Less than 20 per cent of residents in Reid had two Australia-born parents. In Banks and Chisholm, it was just under 30.

“In particular,” says Jakubowicz, “these were seats with strong east Asian communities.”

As Jakubowicz studied the electoral commission figures, another thing struck him. In all three seats, there had been exceptionally strong votes for religious- based conservative minor parties.

In Reid, where the Liberals’ Craig Laundy held on with a margin of 4.7 per cent, there were two such minor party candidates. Kang Ju, of the Reverend Fred Nile’s Christian Democratic Party, won 4.1 per cent of the vote and Marylou Carter, of Family First, won 2.3 per cent. Their preferences flowed strongly to Laundy.

In Banks, Sharon Wu from Family First pulled 1.8 per cent, and Nile’s candidate Greg Bondar more than doubled his party’s previous vote, to 5.32. The Liberal candidate, David Coleman, rode their preferences to claim the seat, on a slim 1.4 per cent majority.

In Chisholm, the Liberals’ Julia Banks won the formerly Labor seat by 2.9 per cent. She also benefitted from strong preference flows from the Family First candidate, who got 2.5 per cent of the vote, and also from Rise Up Australia, another Christian conservative party that gained 1.2 per cent.

“So Turnbull effectively won the 2016 election on the preferences of those voters in those seats,” says Jakubowicz.

“It became clear one of the reasons for that, as I looked at the Mandarin-speaking population, was that social media was being used very heavily by conservative Christian groups, who ran against same-sex marriage and Safe Schools.”

Of course, this tactic wasn’t limited to the minor, fringe religious parties.

Now the Liberal candidate for Chisholm, following Julia Banks’s desertion of the party and the seat, Gladys Liu was the Liberal Party’s communities engagement committee chairwoman for Victoria in 2016. A week after that election she was quoted by Guardian Australia boasting about the role she played in Banks’s victory in Chisholm, organising against Labor through Chinese social media, particularly WeChat.

In the Guardian interview, Liu repeated a number of the false claims about the Safe Schools program that were made in the online campaign. She disparaged same-sex marriage as “against normal practice” and argued that “Chinese people” did not want to see their children “destroyed, they use the word destroyed, by these sort of concepts considered same-sex, transgender, intergender, crossgender and all that rubbish”.

When those comments re-emerged last week, Liu first tried to dismiss them as “fake news”. When an audio recording was produced, she changed tack, saying she was only relaying comments made to her by members of the Chinese community.

However, the evidence suggests otherwise. Not only did Liu organise the online scare campaign, the LGBTQI newspaper The Star Observer reported that she played a role in co-ordinating a 5000-signature Chinese-language petition against Safe Schools and presenting it to Victorian Liberal MPs.

Liu’s official campaign biography for this election still boasts: “After Chisholm ultimately proved to be the only seat in Australia that the Liberal Party gained from Labor to secure a one-seat majority, the Labor candidate acknowledged the Chinese-language campaign as a major factor.”

The Labor candidate, Stefanie Perri, did more than “acknowledge” the success of the campaign – she complained bitterly about its misrepresentations, as did Labor operatives in those other seats where similar operations were mounted against the party’s candidates.

But elections are tough and dirty affairs and the reality is that the Liberal Party, aided by social and religious conservatives, stole a march on Labor in 2016. As one Labor operative says: “It is widely recognised in the ALP that the party did not have a particularly good strategy at the last election for engaging, particularly, the Chinese community. We didn’t have a WeChat strategy. We didn’t fight back against the Safe Schools and same-sex marriage scaremongering.

“This time we have a [campaign] unit entirely focused on outreach to the million-odd voters of Chinese origin.”

Social and religious conservatism is not a crime. I don’t agree with it but so what? That’s liberal democracy for you. Live and let live. Besides, the elected LNP government actually went the other way on progressive social policy.

The bigger question raised by Mike Seccombe’s article is what does targeting migrant communities with particular policies do to Australian democracy itself? What happens in twenty years when the current pace of mass immigration boosts the Chinese immigrant community to three times the size, with a big majority born in China? What if the Communist Party of China (CCP) demands obedience from its diaspora to an invasion of Taiwan? Or a war with Japan? Or the establishment of a naval base in the Solomon Islands effectively ending Australian sovereignty? Or it simply demands a further increase in the rate of Chinese settlement into Australia and the dissolution of ANZUS? Or any number of other power projection strategies designed to colonise and erase Western Pacific democracies, which is the CCP’s explicit goal.

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Mass immigration in its current form is already forcing compromise of political values on Australian governments. Bill Shorten appeared on WeChat just this week to declare:

…“America will always be importan­t to the security for Australia, but if I am prime minister I welcome the rise of China in the world,’’ he said. “I don’t see … China as a strategic threat. I see it as a strategic opportunity. What I want to see is greater mutual understanding ­between all of us.”

But the China Communist Party is a strategic threat, a direct rival to liberal democracy that has Australia’s intelligence and military establishment very alarmed, in contrast (and conflict?) with Bill Shorten. The CCP is an openly fascistic state, vastly illiberal with ever greater centralised control under an explicit dictator deploying the full power of technological surveillance for control, and imprisoning millions of its enemies point blank. It is no exaggeration to say that the CCP is the gravest threat to the Western liberal democratic model of government (of which Australia is an example) since the Second World War. Moreover, the CCP has already displayed a willingness to project power, as great powers always do, and use it to undermine economically allied democracies wherever it likes.

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Questions posed about how an anti-gay Chinese community decided an Australian election in 2016 must be much broader than about culture and sexuality. The debate must encompass freedom itself and, more particularly, the durability of Australian liberal democratic principle as mass immigration outpaces our political system’s ability to reproduce itself across generations. That’s the one mistake in Mike Seccombe’s excellent article. The policy compromises that are being used to buy the votes of the Chinese community are not “a subject of little interest to most Australians”. Boosting parental visas by 100k is economically preposterous but, much more importantly, it adds another large inflow of migrants that carries within it the germ of policy compromises that can threaten Australia’s liberal democratic system itself.

It doesn’t matter if migrants are white, brown, yellow, pink or green. What matters is that if mass immigration continues unchecked while CCP power projection grows then we risk being unable to freely decide anything at all.

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.