Will Victorians soon be boasting that Dan Andrews made the trains run on time?
They’re a weird bunch, my old home-staters. For decades, Victoria was solidly conservative, with the Bolte and Hamer Liberal governments leading the state for a solid quarter-century. But, from the 80s on, Victoria has leaned further and further left, ‘til it’s just about ready to break off the map. Under the appallingly inept pandemic management of the Andrews government, Victoria has already become the pariah of the mainland states.
Yet many Victorians continue to worship their Dear Leader.
Andrews is also making Victoria a pariah state with his slavish devotion to the Chinese communists. Against all national security advice, and to the fury of the commonwealth government, Andrews signed Victoria to Xi Jinping’s notorious Belt and Road Initiative.
In alarming new revelations – which should pose a warning to New Zealanders, as Jacinda Ardern moves to copy Andrews and also sign up to the BRI – it has emerged that Melbourne’s new train fleet will be built by a company blacklisted by the US on security grounds, and which is the beneficiary of Uighur slave labour. The train deal also exposes sham claims that the BRI benefits China’s partners.
The finest trains that slave labour and corruption can buy. The BFD. Photoshop by Lushington Brady.
CRRC Changchun Railway Vehicles, which beat local bids in 2016 to win the contract to build 65 new high-capacity metro trains, is a subsidiary of major Chinese state-owned rolling stock manufacturer CRRC and has been identified as a beneficiary of Uighur labour.
The news comes after fresh scrutiny on the Victorian government’s dealings with the Chinese government with the revelation that Premier Daniel Andrews last year advertised the state as being “China’s gateway to Australia”[…]
But CRRC has been flagged by the US Defence Department as a potential cyber-security threat through its involvement in critical infrastructure. It was also listed in a March report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute as one of 82 companies directly or indirectly benefiting from the use of Uighur workers through potentially abusive labour programs.
The report found KTK Group, a supplier to CRRC, began using Uighur labour in 2019 at one of its Chinese factories.
As many African nations which rushed to benefit from Beijing’s apparent largesse have already found, the “benefits” of the BRI are very much one-way. Almost always, BRI contracts are awarded to Chinese cronies of the Xi regime. CRRC has been repeatedly accused of late delivery and supplying faulty stock. The company was responsible for 40 trains being taken off the tracks in New Zealand in 2014 due to asbestos contamination. In South Africa, trains were defective and criminal charges laid over alleged corruption. Even in China, the company has a reputation for being behind rising train malfunctions.
Corruption is just another part of the Chinese communist package deal.
Downer Rail is a member of the same consortium as CRRC. Purely coincidentally, no doubt, a Downer employee left the company and took up a top role in the Victorian government’s rail tender process – the same process, remember, that overruled local contractors in favour of a Beijing crony. Once the Chinese company had successfully secured the contract, he quit his government job and within two months was back at Downer Rail.
Nothing to see here, folks.
Alarm in the US about CRRC’s connections to the ruling Chinese Communist Party crosses party lines.
In June, the US Defence Department made public for the first time a list of Chinese companies operating in the US that have close ties to the Chinese government or military. Companies on the list, which includes Huawei and CRRC, can be subject to emergency economic powers and sanctions by the US president[…]
Andrew Grotto, a former senior director for cyber-security policy on the US National Security Council, said malware could divert data collected from trains’ security cameras and be used for facial recognition and to track riders.
Chuck Schumer, the Democrats’ Senate minority leader, last year demanded the Trump administration investigate national security risks associated with CRRC’s involvement in New York’s subway system, while the Pentagon pointed to Beijing’s 2018 hacking of US business secrets as reason to beware of Chinese involvement in train building.
Victoria’s recklessness threatens moves by the commonwealth to establish a regional network of South-East Asian allies to contain China.
China-Australian relations expert John Fitzgerald, emeritus professor at Swinburne University of Technology, said[…]the “extraordinary focus” on China by the Victorian government may come at the expense of deeper engagement with India and Japan. “Did [Mr Andrews] offer similar investment opportunities on projects to Japanese, Indian and other regional partners?” he asked.
Corruption, security threats, local jobs sent to China…this is what New Zealanders can expect from Jacinda Ardern’s starry-eyed determination to sign on to Communist China’s leading soft power initiative.
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