It’s sad for the party and very unhealthy for the nation. The AFR lined up Labor’s China greybeards yesterday and it was not a good look. Ross Garnaut was circumspect:
“We have to focus on identifying clearly Australia’s essential national interests in the relationship with China. We have to cleverly maintain those interests and we have to build on the hugely valuable economic relationship that we have with China.”
Professor Garnaut added “I think that with application of knowledge and analysis we can achieve all of these things”.
“Some of the things we have done have been absolutely necessary. Our political system needed protection against foreign interference, including but not only Chinese interference.
But it got worse from there:
Craig Emerson, Gillard’s trade minister at the time, says he and other ministers shared unscripted banter with Li and with President Xi Jinping on the historic trip.
“My impression of him [Xi] was that he was a pretty friendly kind of guy. He was very ambitious for the country but knew it still had a long way to go, particularity on human rights. He actually said that,” Emerson recalls of his meeting with China’s strongman president, who has abolished term limits on his presidency.
In short, Xi’s a good bloke. More:
…But the tipping point was the Morrison government’s call in April for a global inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus. The call, initially flagged by Foreign Minister Marise Payne during a television interview, hit a nerve in Beijing, which believes it should have been given a heads-up beforehand.
“It had been building before that, the rhetoric coming out of Canberra from 2017 onwards. I think that was really very unfortunate at a time when China was feeling vulnerable and was very conscious of the problem of this virus having got out of control,” Stephen Fitzgerald, Australia’s first ambassador to China in 1973, says.
In short, as Australians were caught in a once per century pandemic and the CCP was busy deflecting responsibility to detriment of all outcomes, we should have just zipped it. More:
Kevin Rudd delighted Chinese audiences with his ability to speak Mandarin but oversaw a rough patch in relations when Rio Tinto angered China after withdrawing from a joint venture with state-owned Chinalco. Rio Tinto executive Stern Hu was arrested in 2009 and served nine years in jail on bribery charges.
In 2012, the Gillard government launched the Asian Century white paper to much fanfare. Not everything was smooth sailing though, as her government also banned Huawai from bidding for government broadband contracts.
And more again from Colin Barnett who bald-faced lies that the new legislation is only about BRI on the fake left ABC:
How widespread will the Government’s proposed new laws on foreign deals be? #QandA pic.twitter.com/2Puc5ME8dA
— QandA (@QandA) August 31, 2020
With more support from the useful idiots at The Guardian:
Victorian Labor senator Kim Carr told Guardian Australia the party should be wary about the government’s legislation to review and scrap agreements between universities and foreign governments. He saw the move as part of “a half-baked campaign against our scientists and researchers for partisan political reasons”.
Graham Perrett, Labor’s assistant education and training spokesman, said universities felt they were in the government’s crosshairs and he believed there was “a lot of cheap politics in this … with a little soupçon of xenophobia thrown in”.
For the truth we turn to China itself:
“I don’t think the China-Australia relationship is impossible to repair,” says Zhu Feng, dean of the school of international relations at Nanjing University. “Both sides should lower their expectations on the bilateral relationship. China needs to accept that Australia is a member of the Western camp while Australia needs to realise it is impossible to keep close ties with China on trade while maintaining close security ties with the US.”
And that’s the rub. All we need to do is substitute the liberal hegemon with the illiberal hegemon and our elites will be rich! We know what that looks like in a definite sense because we have experienced the thin of the wedge for five years: hopelessly corrupted democracy and business, rule by a force-settled, rapidly-expanding Chinese diaspora, crushed freedom of speech, ruined universities and intellectual traditions. What remains of the democracy – freedom of movement, freedom of religion and belief, legal rights – will entirely be at the whim of the good bloke in Beijing.
Does Labor in its heart of hearts really see this as electable?
