China grovelling is not “maturity”, it is treason

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The G7 knows what to do, led by Joe Biden:

“We’re not looking to decouple from China. We’re looking to de-risk and diversify our relationship with China which means taking steps to diversify our supply chains so we are not dependent on any one country for necessary products. It means resisting economic coercion together and countering harmful practices that hurt our workers. It means protecting that narrow set of advanced technologies critical for our national security. Those elements were all agreed by the G7.”

How strange it is that it was Australia that played such a critical role in underlining this threat to liberal economies, yet it is now Australia that is ignoring the risk:

Australia is being treated “more seriously as a country” since the Albanese government ended the nation’s “shrill” political debate over China and began stabilising relations with Beijing, Richard Marles has declared.

The Defence Minister told News Corp’s Defending Australia dinner in Canberra on Monday night that China remained a “significant source of anxiety in respect of our national security”.
But, days after Anthony Albanese confirmed he had been invited for an official visit to Beijing, Mr Marles said Australia wanted to engage in a productive relationship with China, “because, quite obviously, China matters”.

“Today this is an uncontroversial statement to make. But a year ago it was a statement that brought populist condemnation,” he told the dinner at the Australian War Memorial.

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If there was ever a worse pack of lies spoken at the shrine then I’m yet to hear them.

  • It was the LNP that stood up to China and put Australia on the map such that the G7 is now doing what it is doing. Not Labor.
  • It was the LNP that was invited to address the G7 at the height of tensions. Not Labor.
  • It was the LNP that broke Chinese wolf warriors such that they backed down on the trade war. Not Labor.

All Labor did throughout was blame Australia and demand more groveling. It sided with Beijing and it rode a wave of ethnic Chinese voting, encouraged by Beijing, to power.

Now we have Albo’s China grovellers rewriting history, rewriting strength as a weakness, and vice versa, not to mention playing domestic politics with the LNP’s only achievement in government.

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Most damning, they are hurtling straight back into the China noose that everybody else is fleeing from while building a submarine fleet governed by the US, that will blockade our own trade routes to China if conflict starts.

This is not mature strategic thinking. It is idiocy indistinguishable from treason.

About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.