Readers will be familiar with Professor Jame Curran, Professor of modern history at Sydney University and recidivist China groveller.
Indeed, the good professor’s kowtowing is so entrenched that he has taken to re-writing recent history in support of it:
The White House’s top Asia official has spoken publicly of his fear that “not very many years ago”, Australia “flirted” with a “different kind of orientation” with China.
Dr Kurt Campbell, President Biden’s Asia tsar, said in Washington last week that while circumstances had now changed fundamentally, there were serious concerns among some in the US that Australia and Britain once looked to be drifting into China’s orbit.
…Never mind the validity or otherwise of Campbell’s historical assessment, though it is highly provocative and factually inaccurate.
No, it isn’t. This blog has live chronicled Australia’s drift into the Chinese strategic orbit:
- First came the commodity export boom (2003-2012).
- Next came the education, housing and wider investment boom (2013-2018).
- Then came the parliamentary bribery booms (2015-2018).
- There has been a Chinese migration boom and there are now half a dozen federal seats that vote with Beijing (2005-2020).
It is a fact that Australia’s national security community was aghast at the strategic drift towards Beijing through the pre-COVID period. This is one of the reasons why it led the global push against Huawei.
The process was labelled the “Silent Invasion” in 2018 by Clive Hamilton. It was very real and, ultimately, actively pushed back by the combined efforts of a large anti-foreign influence policy push and the propitious timing of COVID.
Why is Professor Curran lying about it to make the Americans look foolish? He wants to wedge them:
The comments also lay bare Washington’s assumption of authority, combined with concern that their Australian base, long considered so safe an asset for unforeseen problems in Japan, the Korean peninsula and China, might one day stray from the American nest.
…They are broadly consistent with remarks made to this columnist by a US embassy official, namely that the Albanese Labor government’s success in “stabilising” relations with China risks forgetting Beijing’s economic coercion and foreign interference, and that Australia is not sticking its neck out enough on supporting Taiwan.
The question, as ever, is what more do the Americans want?
And here’s the rub. The comments do highlight, even if implicitly, some differences in how both countries approach China.
No recent Australian government has formally signed on to Washington’s rubric of “strategic competition” with Beijing.
…Campbell, questioned about Australia’s commitment to the US submarine industrial base, along with the challenges of repairing stricken vessels in dry dock and deploying them more rapidly, added that “when submarines are provided from the United States to Australia, it’s not like they’re lost. They will just be deployed by the closest possible allied force”.
Deployed, sure, but doing whose bidding? The Albanese government has always maintained it will retain full sovereign control over its nuclear-powered submarines. But Campbell’s rider – that they are “not lost” to the United States – is a critical one.
Is the good professor surprised? Australia’s choices are limited.
The rules-based order is given objectivity only by the US liberal empire. Without that force, it will be substituted by a Chinese illiberal version, which we have already experienced in the 14 conditions to end democracy and economic coercion.
This is a hegemonic struggle; a battle between a liberal US empire, for all its flaws, and an illiberal Chinese empire, with its considerably larger ones.
Aussies gave China a chance to liberalise. It’s gone the other way, with increasing violence since 2011. And most recently spat on Australia for its trouble.
Australia is a US client state and our hegemonic betters will demand a price when the time comes. We have guarded supply dumps in every consequential American war and will do so again.
We know want the Americans want. We also know what the Chinese want. And we know which is better. This is why Australians fulsomely support both AUKUS and American military deployment Donwunder.
The only people that don’t seem to understand it are Albo and Professor Curran.
