Instead of the sack, “double agent” Gladys Liu gets a makeover

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Gladys Liu got a makeover Saturday thanks to a puff piece in the Good Weekend:

Gladys Liu is in her kitchen, rustling up dinner. While the politician stirs and sautés, my eye is caught by a photograph on the wall of a glamorous woman dressed in a cheongsam. Her hair is swept into an elegant coiffure. She clasps a fan and strikes a pose. When I move closer and study the image, I realise with a start who the woman is. At least, I think I recognise her. Spending time with Liu is like falling down a rabbit hole into a world where things are not always what they seem. She glances up. “Yes, that’s me,” she says.

The piece was not without criticism but clearly implied that if Galdys Liu is an agent of influence for the Chinese Communist Party then it is owing to passivity and naivety not malice and aforethought.

To me there was zero comfort (or relevance) in this. Naivety is no excuse for channeling CCP money into the Morrison Government. That’s absurd.

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Liu should have been sacked months ago. Whether she is groomed or not, she is an agent of foreign influence via the money that she so excitedly channels, and is obviously and openly an inappropriate person to hold any ministerial office.

The same standard was applied to Sam Dastayari, who Peter Dutton labeled a “double agent”.

That instead Gladys Liu gets top billing with a Good Weekend puff piece, I’d guess negotiated by Government flackers, tells you just how low the Australian political economy has sunk.

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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.