While the Labor opposition in Australia openly crawl to the Chinese Communist Party, the Coalition government’s attitude is somewhat ambivalent.
On the one hand, Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg talk a good game about curtailing Chinese interests buying up Australia’s strategic assets – while the Foreign Investment Review Board seems to just keep on rubber-stamping it.
But Foreign Minister Marise Payne is really serving it to the bullies in Beijing.
Foreign Minister Marise Payne has delivered the boldest and most important speech of her career. It contains a simple message to Beijing: Australia is not backing down.
In a forthright address, Payne called out China for its systematic campaign of disinformation in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. She rightly, if brutally, observed that at a time of pandemic, disinformation will cost lives.
She cited the European Commission report that charged China and Russia with massive campaigns of disinformation concerning the pandemic. This was an immensely significant report. The Europeans are not what you’d call habitually courageous in public dealings with Beijing, and for them to call out the Chinese Communist Party government in this way indicates that the information is undeniable and the practices egregious.
Payne’s defence of democracy was passionate. She was also rightly blunt in calling out as disinformation Beijing’s claim Chinese people face severe racism in Australia and should not come here.
This is just as blunt as it gets[…]Beijing is systematically telling lies. This has to be added to the statement by former PM Malcolm Turnbull in his memoirs that Beijing engages in vastly more espionage against Australia than any other power has ever done. Add all that up, and it’s a very disturbing reality, one that Australian governments have to respond to and manage.
Australia has also been leading the call for a genuine, international inquiry into the Xi Plague. Just how worried Beijing is can be gauged by the ferocity with which it has tried to grind Australia under its bootheel. Beijing’s bullying ranges from financial punishment, like cancelling billions of dollars worth of import orders and trying to dissuade Chinese students from coming to Australia, to brute force, as an Australia actor arrested on drugs charges is suddenly scheduled for death by firing squad.
Payne is unapologetic about the Morrison government’s decision to publicly seek a full independent inquiry into how COVID-19 began and how it was managed in the early days. She rightly rejects the idea Australia should have abandoned this principled, necessary and reasonable request because it might upset the Chinese.
To those who say such an inquiry would have happened anyway, she has this withering reply: “Nothing just happens anyway.”
Unfortunately, Payne muddies her message with Trump Derangement – slyly attacking the West’s biggest bastion against Chinese aggression.
The other part of Payne’s formulation is that Canberra needs to step up its involvement in a range of multilateral bodies, to advance our interests and values, and to make sure they are not dominated by Beijing. This is an implicit, and justified, criticism of the Trump administration for walking away from too many of these bodies.
Bodies like…the WHO? The UN? The Trump administration is more than justified in dumping what have become little more than the enablers of tyrants, from Beijing to Tehran.
What will work against China is not more of the same tired, failed globalism, but a return to hard-headed realism. Contrary to the hand-flapping of outraged globalists, foreign policy realism is not a Hobbesian world of dog-eat-dog. Sovereign self-interest necessarily means that nations with mutual interests will unite and co-operate.
Australia, Japan and India are already forging a network of self-interested co-operation across the Pacific. Instead of slighting the world’s most powerful administration, Payne would be well advised to bring Trump on-side.
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