Opinion
As I reported for The BFD, the Chinese Communist Party poured rivers of money into getting Labor elected in 2022. They can’t say they haven’t got their money’s worth.
The Albanese government has reportedly removed ASIO boss Mike Burgess and ASIS chief Kerri Hartland from its National Security Committee.
Sky News’s Sharri Markson has reported that Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet Glyn Davis removed the permanent positions for the ASIO and ASIS heads within the Committee. Future ASIO and ASIS chiefs would have to be invited onto the Security Committee from here on.
“We don’t comment on matters relating to national security,” a Labor spokesperson said to Sky News when approached for a reply.
This latest craven venality comes just weeks after Burgess finally admitted that China has co-opted large swathes of Australian politicians, bureaucrats, academics and business people, into its spy networks. Including one, so far un-named, politician whom Burgess more-or-less directly accused of treason.
China was enraged — and sent one of its most reliable Quisling attack dogs into the fray. Former PM Paul Keating, who has long taken Beijing’s money via decades on the payroll of the CCP-owned China Development Bank, angrily cracked the whip for his paymasters.
Albo barely even bothered to stop and ask how high.
“It is very concerning to hear that the Albanese government has removed intelligence and security agency heads from the critical committee of government considering national security matters,” opposition home affairs spokesperson James Paterson said to Sky News.
“No wonder this government has been so weak and incompetent on national security. They should reverse this reckless decision urgently.”
The Australian
Xi’s poodle is already scurrying to beg for a treat and a pat on the head.
Paul Keating […] confirmed he had accepted an invitation to meet with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Sydney this week – an inflammatory move that could upstage the diplomat’s meetings with [Penny Wong] and Anthony Albanese […]
Wang’s request for an audience with Keating – revealed by The Australian on Monday – is straight out of the Chinese Communist Party playbook. Senior Chinese officials often call on sympathetic former leaders in the countries they travel to, just as they seek out supporters in the Australian-Chinese business communities. It sends a signal to the host government and the Chinese domestic audience about China’s wider influence.
But it’s a particularly bold move in this case, given Labor’s relatively accommodating position on China and the scale of Keating’s attacks on Wong. As China watcher Clive Hamilton has observed, Keating is one of Beijing’s “most committed advocates”, arguing human rights are a Western concept that doesn’t apply to China, and lauding the CCP as “the best government in the world in the last 30 years”.
He’s only carrying on a venerable Labor tradition of toadying to the Chinese Communists. It should never be forgotten that then-opposition leader Gough Whitlam broke with Australia’s then stance, to crawl off to Beijing and lick the CCP’s boots, even as the mass murder of the Cultural Revolution was in full swing. Whitlam remains a near-god-like figure for Labor — as does Keating.
Labor figures privately dismiss the former PM as “yesterday’s man”. But the 80-year-old former leader still has influence in the party.
Jim Chalmers speaks to him regularly, and his strident anti-AUKUS views are shared by many of Labor’s rank and file.
Of course, Chalmers never misses an opportunity to crawl to his idol. Chalmers earned his doctorate — not in economics, of course, but in political “science” — with a hagiography of Keating.
But even the Albanese government’s supine attitude to China isn’t enough for its Potts Point Quisling. Keating is more than happy to be Beijing’s useful idiot.
China wants to have its cake and eat it too. It will take Wong and Albanese’s careful statements on the bilateral relationship as a show of respect, while using Keating to amplify its own attacks on Australian and US policy.
It’s hard to believe Keating is an unwitting party in the charade.
The Australian
Of course not: but the Yuan talks.