OPINION
As I wrote, long ago, Australia was, and still is, as he remains in parliament, plagued with two Scott Morrisons.
There was Scott Morrison the global statesman, justly recognised around the world for his government’s brave and resolute stance against unprecedented trade and diplomatic bullying from China. For helping steer both the Quad and AUKUS alliances.
Unfortunately, what Australians saw too much of, and learned to loathe, was the domestic politician, “Scotty from Marketing”, who stood for nothing except caving to the left on every domestic policy issue. Scotty from Marketing alienated enough of his own voters that the execrable Anthony Albanese was able to slither into the Lodge on a mere 32 per cent of the vote.
Yet, Scott Morrison still occasionally shows the sort of conviction that might have saved him from Scotty’s fate.
Former prime minister Scott Morrison has called for Australia to deepen its relationship with Taiwan by overhauling its long-standing “One China” policy and allowing the self-governing territory to participate in key international forums such as the Quadrilateral security dialogue.
You just know the socialist Albanese government, and its fatuous Foreign Minister Penny Wong, will furiously disagree. Not just because they’ll automatically gainsay anything Morrison says, but because of their own innate sympathies with a communist dictatorship.
Warning that conflict over Taiwan would cause a severe global economic depression, radically alter the security environment in the Indo-Pacific and reset the balance of the international order in favour of authoritarianism, Morrison said the future of Taiwan was more important than any other conflict, including the war in Ukraine.
“I believe Taiwan stands above them all,” he said. “[China’s] claims over Taiwan are a threat to the entire region” […]
Control of Taiwan would give China access to the Pacific and allow its submarines to enter deep water undetected.
Morrison is calling to end decades of policy gutlessness by successive Australian governments.
To enhance deterrence of a Chinese invasion, Morrison said it was time to re-evaluate Australia’s One China policy, which acknowledges China’s claim to Taiwan but does not endorse it.
The policy has been widely interpreted within the federal government as limiting Australia from supporting Taiwan’s participation in key international forums and preventing senior politicians, such as sitting prime ministers, from meeting Taiwanese officials.
This interpretation has rankled Taiwanese officials, including Taiwan’s chief representative in Australia, who last month pleaded with local officials not to be “lazy” by falling into the trap of uncritically accepting Beijing’s claims about Taiwan’s territorial status.
“This appraisal should challenge the justice of denying the people of Taiwan, who have expressed a clear preference for freedom through the success of their representative democracy, greater certainty over their autonomy,” Morrison said.
He said the admission of Taiwan as a non-state into the Comprehensive and Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, Interpol and the World Health Organisation would “be a great start”, enhancing its practical autonomy “without crossing the threshold of national statehood”.
The Age
For all China’s threats and bluster, it stands to lose badly if it attempts to invade Taiwan. Not just militarily – for all the bluster about China’s military might, the fact remains is that it would have to mount a bigger sea-and-air borne invasion than D-Day, across a much wider stretch of water – but economically.
The UK’s Foreign Secretary James Cleverly has said any conflict over Taiwan would collapse China’s economy and warned Beijing that what happens in the strait is everybody’s business.
Cleverly, who comes under sharp criticism from hawkish Conservative MPs for being too dovish on China, said that if Xi Jinping were to take over the island, as the Chinese president has threatened, that would constitute a “massive failure of foreign policy” […]
“It would be a catastrophically bad thing for the global economy, and it would be a catastrophically bad thing for the Chinese economy.
“Conflict across the Taiwan Strait would, I think, collapse the Chinese economy and bring a number of other economies with it,” he said.
Except that, as Australia found during China’s Covid retaliation, economic dependence on China is far more easily broken than the hand-wringers would have us believe. For all the wailing and crying poor by greedy businesses who’d grown lazily fat by dealing with a brutal communist dictatorship, other markets were soon keen to get in on what China had been scarfing up all for itself.
In fact, much of the world would be better off if it stopped trading with China.
He said that African countries processing their own critical minerals, instead of selling them raw to China, could help stop the flow of migrant boats to the UK, via Europe.
“It also helps us to stop the boats, because guess what, if we can lift those African economies, poor Africans are going to be less desirous to try and cross the Mediterranean and cross the Channel to try and come to the UK,” he said.
The Age
Try telling that to the CEOs who’ve been all-too-happy to take China’s money by the fist-full, though.