Because, increasingly, you will have neither.
Ahead of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s upcoming trip to China, Sussan Ley said Australia should be wary of the expansion of an existing free trade agreement to include artificial intelligence and the digital economy.
In an opinion piece in the Financial Review, China’s ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian, urged Albanese to embrace AI as one area ripe for co-operation under an updated China-Australia free trade agreement, which entered into force in 2015.
…Asked whether she had apologised to community leaders over Senator Jane Hume’s remarks about Chinese spies, which sparked backlash from Chinese Australians during the election campaign, Ley said she would not go into the details of private discussions.
“I freely admitted that we did not get it right, that our tone wasn’t right and the messaging wasn’t right, and that we needed to change course, course correct for the future. And I think that message was well received, but I also know that the Chinese Australian community expects ongoing dialogue from this point forward.”
Neither party got the Chinese diaspora right because neither attacked it enough.
If ethnic Chinese voters of a certain vintage are going to vote based upon pro- or negative- Beijing policies, which fundamentally undermine democracy for everybody else, including all other migrants, then they need to be better educated.
This is one of the key sources of the Labour pivot to China. When it wins over this segment, which occupies roughly seven federal seats to varying degrees, the ethnic Chinese vote becomes very influential via Bennelong, Reid, Parramatta, Chisholm, Menzies, Aston, and Banks.
This is not the same as the Muslim vote, which is multinational and diversified as a national interest bloc. Nor is it the same as the Jewish vote, which is democratic and has no regional implications.
Recent vintage Chinese immigrants, especially those with relatives in China under threat, are a direct risk to the objectivity of Canberra’s foreign and strategic policy around China, and therefore to your democracy, as federal parties mull over snuggling up to the expansionist tyranny for personal gain.
A few obvious steps present themselves. Banning the CCP ambassador and his underlings from the media would be a good start. Banning WeChat is another.
I don’t have the answer, but we must ask the question.
