From The Guardian comes some sort of sense:
Former Australian prime ministers Malcolm Turnbull and Kevin Rudd have urged the federal government not to ramp up rhetoric against China for domestic political purposes, arguing it could harm social cohesion.
Turnbull said he worried “that some of the political rhetoric, if played for the local rightwing media peanut gallery, can actually undermine something that is very precious, which is the success of our multicultural society”.
…Rudd, the Labor prime minister from 2007 to 2010, referenced concerns in the United States that some of the rhetoric about China had made life “dangerous on the streets for Asian Americans”.
He said part of the mission of the Asia Society – of which he is chief executive – was “to roll back the tide of a growing racism in the United States against Asian Americans”.
“I don’t want to see that here,” Rudd said. He argued the prime minister, Scott Morrison, and the defence minister, Peter Dutton, had a predisposition to use “the rhetorical overdrive stick” when it came to navigating complex challenges with China.
There is some truth to this. As I have said repeatedly, Morrison government rhetoric has done a lot of inadvertent harm to the Chinese relationship.
The thing is, though, even if largely accidental and sometimes jingoistic, the Chinese decoupling has very much been in the national interest. It has helped reorient Australia’s strategic outlook from an untenable straddle between great powers, and away from over-exposure to the tyrannical one of the pair.
This will continue in the years ahead as the structural fissure between Australian liberalism and CCP illiberalism widens.
I won’t defend Morrison’s motormouth but it’s unlikely the China divorce would have happened at such speed without it. That gestures at a sad truth of contemporary politics. We’re simply too stupid and corrupt to do anything in a planned and orderly fashion so it is inevitable that some eggs will be broken to achieve larger goals.
It’s a good thing that the former PMs are defending Australians of Chinese heritage. There is no place for racism in this debate. But let’s acknowledge, too, that the decoupling from Beijing also protects local ethnic Chinese from coercion and other influence operations. As a part of that, at some point, we are going to have cut the flow of Chinese migrants, without being racist about it.
On that basis, if the Morrison government does ramp the anti-CCP rhetoric in the months ahead, and it intensifies the Beijing pushback, then that’s not bad for any Australian (except, perhaps, Labor greybeards).
Pollies are scum but Australians are mature enough to do this without turning into them.
