Agent of China influence, Geoff Raby, turns desperate

Australia’s most prominent China agent of influence, Geoff Raby, is back with yet another desperate plea for the Morrison Government is resume kowtowing to the CCP, at the AFR:

It is not often that a column by an Australian journalist is published in full, in Chinese, in China, especially only a day after its publication in Australia.

…The reprinting of the interview in the online journal, Observer, is official endorsement of Mme Fu’s comments. Not that there should have been any doubt about that. Her written answers to Smith’s questions would have been cleared at the most senior levels of China’s Foreign Ministry, if not within the leadership compound of Zhongnanhai itself.

…Forget Fu Ying’s reassurances that trade continues, and decoupling can’t happen because of the profound complementarities between the two economies will ensure enduring deep interdependence. These are commonplaces that Australian business, unlike strategic policy advisers, understands. The forlorn outlook for India as it struggles unsuccessfully with Covid-19 only reinforces this assessment.

…In the face of what everyone knows to be true, it is her statement that relations are not frozen and ministerial level contact has not been blocked which is the most noteworthy. It is clearly absurd. She knows otherwise. Trade Minister, Simon Birmingham, never tires of confirming the freeze, albeit in the most balanced and polite terms possible given the circumstances.

One really has to ask if Geoff Raby has conspired with Fu Ying on this media campaign. He would definitely know her. I’ve met her, for heaven’s sake. Did they talk?

After all, the article is propaganda bull. Decoupling is quite possible and happening now. Chinese students and tourists have fallen off a cliff. Coal is off the cliff. LNG is off the cliff. Barley is off the cliff. Mr Raby’s desperate pleading is on behalf of clients that being decoupled before our very eyes, as a registered agent of foreign influence (again not cited in the article by a corrupt media):

Registrant name		Activity type	Arrangement status	Foreign principal	Foreign principal country/jurisdiction*
Geoffrey William Raby		Other activity (former Cabinet Minister or recent designated position holder)	Active	Yancoal Ltd	China

Mr Raby works for just about everybody engaged with the CCP:

In fact, decoupling is accelerating and happening all over, from the FT:

At a time when tensions between Washington and Beijing are increasingly beginning to resemble a new cold war, products ranging from computer servers to the Apple iPhone could end up having two separate supply chains — one for the Chinese market and one for much of the rest of the world.

“In the past, there would be one massive plant in China for the whole world. But that globalisation is gone,” says CY Huang, a Taiwanese investment banker and adviser on a number of deals which have contributed to disentangling global supply chains from China. “It will be more costly, and it will be less efficient. But it is the way that politics is pushing us.”

Foxconn, the $178bn Taiwanese company which makes the iPhone and just about every other tech gadget and which has a workforce of close to 1m in China, says it expects manufacturing to fragment into a China supply chain and several others for the rest of the world.

“The past model, where [manufacturing] is concentrated in just a few countries like a world factory will no longer exist,” Young Liu, Foxconn chairman, said at a conference in June. “What we think is more likely in the future are regional production networks.”

Why? Well, it’s pretty obvious isn’t it? As the Pew Research Center today noted, everybody now hates China:

Views of China have grown more negative in recent years across many advanced economies, and unfavorable opinion has soared over the past year, a new 14-country Pew Research Center survey shows. Today, a majority in each of the surveyed countries has an unfavorable opinion of China. And in Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United States, South Korea, Spain and Canada, negative views have reached their highest points since the Center began polling on this topic more than a decade ago.Negative views of China increased most in Australia, where 81% now say see the country unfavorably, up 24 percentage points since last year. In the UK, around three-quarters now see the country in a negative light – up 19 points. And, in the U.S., negative views of China have increased nearly 20 percentage points since President Donald Trump took office, rising 13 points since just last year.

And for very good reasons. Liberalisation, peaceful rise, cheap goods and high house prices has turned out to be tyranny, militarisation, economic coercion, disease and unemployment. What’s to like?

Why would Australia re-engage with that as the world rightly turns away from it? We share nothing with CCP China. Our values are diametrically opposed. The CCP took democratic goodwill and spent it on years of quiet invasion, corruption of political processes, as well as bribing the elite, debauching our universities and undermining ANZUS. Then it demanded we keep borders open to spread its virus while it siphoned off our PPE. Thanks, matey.

China can have our dirt. If it doesn’t want it then it will go elsewhere. That’s what commodities are, fungible. Otherwise, it can piss right off.

Keep it up and everybody will soon hate you too, Geoff Raby, China agent of influence.