You can tell a lot about someone from who their friends and admirers are. Especially brutal dictators. In that respect, it’s rather telling who the friends of the Chinese communist regime are in Australia.
Academics who had a meltdown at the prospect of a Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation eagerly take the cash and bend over when Beijing’s “Confucius Institutes” order them about. The left wing of Australia’s politicians, who lined up to hurl abuse at then-candidate Donald Trump, take China’s cash and do its political dirty work.
Right now, they’re vociferously attacking Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton, for daring to differ from Beijing’s line.
Peter Dutton is disinclined to delicacy and decided the time was right to establish the parameters of Australia’s friendship with the one-party state. His verdict is thumbs up for bilateral trade, thumbs down for CPC values, and the comrades are not best pleased.
The CPC was founded on opposition to liberal values…on any meaningful measure of cultural values, communists and the modern West are opposed. Yet CPC loyalists were enraged when Dutton stated the obvious.
Naturally, China’s embassy spouted the party line. Indeed, the party line says all you need to know: Beijing’s official policy is that criticising the Communist regime is a “provocation to the Chinese people”. This assumption that the regime and the people are one and the same is textbook totalitarianism: “All within the state…nothing against the state,” as Mussolini put it.
It’s to be expected that Beijing’s embassies would toe the party line. It’s little surprise that the political left in Australia parrots the same line. Which also says all you need to know about them.
Despite mounting evidence of CPC operatives engaging in cyberwarfare and foreign interference, some left-wing politicians appear eager to placate the communist state. Labor MP Peter Khalil said the government has “botched the relationship with China”. He scolded Dutton for speaking in plain terms. His advice? “There’s something called diplomacy, there’s something called diplomatic language.” Crossbench senator Rex Patrick expressed similar concern about Dutton’s lack of “diplomatic skills”.
Within days of MPs objecting to Dutton’s indelicacy, we were given a lesson in diplomacy, communist-style. President Xi Jinping threatened to crush the bodies of democratic activists who dissent from the CPC’s one-party line.
In August, Liberal MP Andrew Hastie compared our naivety about China to France’s presumption of safety from 1930s Germany. What sounded off centre now looks on the mark.
Labor’s defence of the CPC is more than bad optics. The party cannot defend human rights and a regime that marches Muslims to re-education camps, censors the Christian Bible, prohibits freedom of speech and jails dissident artists.
Yet Labor leader Anthony Albanese continues to side with the CPC on matters of great strategic importance.
As in so many policy areas, Labor is increasingly isolated to the far left of public opinion.
Australians are becoming more wary of China’s regional ambitions. Seventy-four per cent think we are too economically dependent on the communist state while 79 per cent believe China’s infrastructure investment projects in Asia are part of its plans for regional domination.
…A September Newspoll found that if given the choice, Labor voters would prefer the government give priority to our relationship with the US over China.
theaustralian.com.au/commentary/duttons-criticisms-of-china-hit-their-mark
Ideologically blinded idiots are as useful to murderous dictators as ever.