The lefty MSM doesn’t get what’s going on. Oddly, it’s even slower than the ALP. The Australian people made the move in 2019/20:
Why the change? Because it’s bleedin’ obvious: South China Sea, Hong Kong, COVID, wolf warriors, Taiwan, economic coercion etc.
The ALP couldn’t see the writing on the wall until the last six months. The lefty MSM still can’t:
Is it right for Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton to weaponise national security in the run-up to an election they evidently fear they could lose?
If you ask the correct question, the answer is simple and clear.
The answer is no.
Unequivocally, no.
Given there is no concrete evidence of significant policy differences between Labor and the Coalition on China – at least none that I’m currently aware of – Morrison and Dutton puffing themselves up like mini-me McCarthyists imperils the national interest.
By turning question time into a treason tribunal – staging a daily Judge Judy session to unmask the sleeper agent in our midst – Morrison and Dutton are actively stoking societal anxiety.
Yes, they are. And that’s good.
For thirty years Australia took the China bribe based on the assumption of “China’s peaceful rise”. At each stage, we compromised ourselves in its name.
Sometime after the millennium, we stopped giving a fuck about our former good friend the Dalai Lama, Tibet, Tiananmen Square and anybody else the CCP chose to slaughter.
Sometime after the GFC, we stopped giving a fuck about free markets, democracy and ANZUS.
Sometime after the mining bust, we stopped giving a fuck about what kind of Chinese money we were taking and where it was going just so long as it kept flowing.
This is more than two decades of inculcation into friendship with a vicious Communist tyranny. The notion that it was going to transform itself into a fun-loving democracy was always a stretch but we were happy to pretend so long as the dough kept coming.
But now that hopeful future is gone. What lies ahead is a long and bloody struggle to retain our identity and freedom, our system of government and social order. The only way we are going to achieve this is if the influence of the compromised interests of the failed China engagement paradigm are discredited and exorcised.
Call it McCarthyism if you want. I prefer to see it as a corrective phase of public discourse that needs to come into line with the hard-nosed assessment of the Australian people: that China is a clear and present danger to everything that we hold dear.
And there is further to go. For instance, the elephant in room. How can ethnic Chinese migration be allowed to continue to capture electorates? Look at Gladys Liu. Not to mention the parachuting of Jason Yat-sen Li into Strathfield last week with the aid of the large local ethnic Chinese community, after he demanded ever more Chinese students and tourists.
To wit, it’s great to see the heat coming onto those who would have a bet each way:
One of Australia’s most respected former public servants, Dennis Richardson, has accused Liberal senator James Paterson of engaging in a “grubby” and “despicable” attempt to blacken his name over comments Paterson made in an interview on Sky News.
Paterson, the chair of federal parliament’s powerful committee on intelligence and security, argued in the interview on Thursday that Richardson, the former head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, had publicly advocated in 2018 that the Chinese telco Huawei should be involved in the Australian 5G rollout.
…Paterson’s critique followed Richardson contending in a series of interviews on Thursday morning that the Morrison government was serving China’s interests, not Australia’s, by politicising national security ahead of the election, and “seeking to create the perception of a difference [between the major parties] when none in practice exists”.
…Richardson told Guardian Australia back when he was the secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the government considered whether or not Huawei would be involved in the 4G network.
“I was on the secretaries committee on national security which recommended against Huawei’s involvement in 4G,” the retired bureaucrat said. “I was not in government in 2018. And I challenge James Paterson to come up with any evidence that I advocated for Huawei’s unmitigated involvement in 5G.
“Given that I was on the secretaries committee on national security that recommended against Huawei being involved in 4G, on what basis I would have advocated for Huawei being in 5G is beyond me.”
Good on both of them. Richardson does have a recent record of defending deep economic engagement with China:
In June [2020], former spy boss and defence secretary Dennis Richardson advised business leaders that, when they are slurred as unpatriotic for emphasising the value of the China trade relationship, ‘they should punch their accuser right on the nose…figuratively that is’.
Richardson’s point was that, by building these ties, these entrepreneurs were creating the prosperity that funds better schools and hospitals – not to mention 12 French-designed submarines worth US$59 billion and 72 US-made F-35s that add another US$12 billion to the defence credit card.
But that level of engagement has proven impossible to manage in terms of malign CCP interest. It comes with a cavalcade of interests that keeps pushing for more. This includes mining, agriculture, importers, universities, real estate, tourism and retail. It’s unmanageable.
Moreover, we didn’t have China to fund our better schools and hospitals before the Millennium and we don’t need it in the future. Richardson is not an economist and does not understand just how flexible the economy is. If we lost ALL China trade tomorrow nearly all of our resources would go somewhere else and we’d be fine after a brief adjustment as the AUD cratered.
In historical terms, how does a few yuan more compare with sustaining the very basics of our liberal democratic system for our kids? We don’t need deep economic engagement, we need radical and deep diversification away from it, and reform aimed at strategic economic independence.
But I digress. Richardson did a good job of defending himself and so he should have to. Just as Labor should have to during this election campaign after its years of China kowtowing and failing to read the writing on the wall. If it can’t then that’s a problem of its own making and it does not deserve Australia’s trust.
This does not excuse making shit up to discredit people in favour of Chinese engagement, but after twenty years of “silent invasion”, Australian institutions need to be unbrainwashed and a little bit of Mccarthyism is all to the good.
