As described yesterday, this is the reality of China’s olive branch to Australia:
Beijing has said the “most difficult time for China-Australia relations has passed”, but told Canberra to improve the relationship the Albanese government needs to reduce hurdles on Chinese businesses.
President Xi Jinping brought up China’s long standing unhappiness with investment hurdles for Chinese businesses in Australia during his Tuesday meeting with Anthony Albanese.
“It is hoped that the Australian side will provide a good business environment for Chinese enterprises to invest and operate in Australia,” Mr Xi told Australia’s Prime Minister, according to China’s official broadcaster CCTV.
In short, if we can’t beat you, we’ll buy you, just as we used to.
Australia has been here before and knows what comes next:
- creeping bribery into local, state, and federal politics;
- the rise of nationalist student bullying at universities;
- the co-opting of Australian elites into “China’s inevitable rise” propaganda;
- the same in the media;
- Chinese bidding for residential property;
- acquisition and occupation of sensitive infrastructure assets;
- the formation of Chinese enclaves in parliamentary seats beholden to Beijing either voluntarily or by coercion.
So on and so forth until the place is barely recognisable ten years later and a new round of scandals has to clear out the fifth-column silent invasion or we lose our democracy for good.
With the corpse of the sensible approach of diversifying away from China barely cold, Xi’s useful idiots are already cock-a-whoop with Geoff Raby and the appalling AFR leading backwards:
Significantly, both Albanese and Xi have returned to basics when discussing the relationship. It has always been based on two fundamental points. First, the enormous complementarities between our economies, not as a result of policy, of course, but resources and respective levels of development. Second, we are both in the Asia-Pacific and have shared interests in peace and stability in the region.
…For too long in Australian policy circles this has been a fact that shall not be mentioned. To ram home the point, he then listed the next four – Japan, Korea, US, New Zealand – and added, in case no one was watching, that China was bigger than all four combined. And where is India?
…Disturbingly, the summit could have been marred by an unattributed release to Australian media that one month ago, Chinese navy vessels had shadowed Australian navy ships on joint manoeuvres with the US and Japan in the South China Sea.
It is more than passing strange that this information was released more than one month after the event – a surveillance which would have been largely routine, in any case – and on the day of the prime minister’s meeting with Xi.
Defence Minister Richard Marles should treat this with utmost seriousness. He needs to take charge of his department and remind them that foreign policy responsibility lies elsewhere. Of the new cabinet, he seems least on top of his department. Remember, it was senior members of the ADF playing domestic politics who gave us children overboard, a confection of deceit and lies.
Yeh, let’s witch-hunt the patriots in defense for letting us know what this is really about.
The war between the national interest and China’s silent invaders is once again joined.
