When wartime Australian PM John Curtin announced Australia’s foreign policy reorientation away from Britain and towards America, he did so “More in sorrow than in anger”. What Curtin meant was that it was now obvious that Britain’s war priorities differed from Australia’s. The issue was brought to a head when Churchill and Curtin clashed over the latter’s decision to withdraw Australian troops from North Africa to meet the Japanese threat in the Pacific.
The Morrison government might express much the same sentiment toward the government of Jacinda Ardern.
Unlike Australia and Britain in 1942, Australia and New Zealand might be thought to have nearly the same defence priorities. But, rather than coming closer, Australia and New Zealand find themselves drifting apart – with China driving the wedge in. Deliberately and strategically: China’s policy is clearly to fracture other governments’ alliances, especially those with the US.
So, more in sorrow than in anger, Canberra has plenty of hard-earned experience it could pass on to Wellington.
Australia’s most recent move to counter Chinese influence is the cancellation of Victoria’s Belt and Road Initiative agreements.
National policy is centred on not wanting to help the Chinese Communist Party create a China-centred global economy, whether through the BRI or Xi Jinping’s ‘dual circulation’ economic strategy.
Handing the Chinese government more power to coerce us economically is clearly not in our interests. If we don’t know that now, with wheat, coal, wine, barley and lobsters, we’re slow learners.
The Morrison government and the Australian public have clearly taken the lesson in. Parts of big business, the political left and almost all of the university sector, far less so.
For the slow learners, China’s hysterical, threatening reaction ought to drive the lesson home.
If Beijing takes further steps to coerce Australia through trade, that will highlight to Australians and to many other governments and companies globally why the decision is the right one.
It will also reinforce corporate Australia’s new understanding of the sheer business risk in corporate plans that place big bets on growing their China market.
Australia spent decades too long labouring under the delusion that we could seek mutual economic engagement with China without exposing ourselves to major security and strategic risks. The illusion of China being a global fair player has been rudely shattered by the Wuhan pandemic and what followed.
Australia has learned the hard way. Are Jacinda Ardern and Nanaia Mahuta taking any notice?
New Zealand will find that its policy framework collides with NZ values and interests, even if its purpose is to protect NZ’s China trade. There are also likely to be growing problems in NZ seeking to maintain a very close partnership in the Five Eyes while taking the approach outlined in its foreign minister’s speech.
Quietly assuring Five Eyes partners that everything is fine, while also assuring Beijing of the same thing, is not sustainable unless China radically changes direction under Xi. As the long-term Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen said, ‘You can’t sit on the fence and keep your ear to the ground without horrible things happening.’
The Strategist
Ardern can prate all she likes about “kindness”, but there’s nothing kind about blind-eye dealing with a genocidal dictatorship. Mahuta is right to talk about New Zealand’s long-standing commitment to human rights: New Zealanders are fair-minded people who’ve often done more than their bit to maintain a free, liberal, democratic world.
But New Zealand’s values simply cannot be squared with China’s – no matter how much money Beijing splashes around.
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