The China Lobby has various groupings, and a strictly accurate China Lobby Watch should note which wing is behind which statements. Today, it’s the business wing pushing the pro-Beijing line.
The Financial Review‘s Jennifer Hewett — who we noted had attended a telco gathering as a guest of Chinese comms giant Huawei and happily peddled that company’s line of deeply aggrieved victimhood — is currently at the Boao Forum, as a guest of Twiggy Forrest.
Boao is China’s equivalent to the annual neoliberal circlejerk in Davos for the World Economic Forum. And, Hewett’s sad to report, business is very unhappy with the frosty relations between China and Australia, the lack of an Australian government presence at Boao, which may or may not relate to the fact that China is refusing entry by Australian ministers, and the lack of recent visits to the Middle Kingdom by Malcolm Turnbull or Julie Bishop.
At The Australian, Sarah-Jane Tasker who — surprise! — is also attending the Boao Forum as a guest of Forrest, channelled a similar line, with plenty of quotes from Twiggy’s CEO Elizabeth Gaines about how Australia was missing out due to its failure to participate in Beijing’s neo-colonialist One Belt, One Road initiative. A number of other business luminaries were there to also lament our poor relationship with China, and — inevitably — chief China Lobbyist Bob Car, who complained “we have positioned ourselves as being the most adversarial to China of any of America’s allies.” Australia’s highest-taxing Treasurer, Peter Costello, was also in Boao to lament “the lack of ministerial contact does show the relationship is strained at the moment”.
Malcolm Turnbull confirmed all that today, admitting that there was “some tension” with China currently.
The important point, however, is that not merely is there tension, but there should be tension. China is a brutal, murderous dictatorship that is aggressively expansionist in its own region, brainwashes its young people into a kind of aggrieved Sinofascist narrative, and has regularly tried to interfere, usually unsuccessfully, in Australian politics. If you’re not tense about and toward China, then you’re not paying attention.
And the fact is the government has handled this correctly. Sure, there have been some stumbles along the way — the government’s ill-advised attempt to pass an extradition treaty with the Butchers of Beijing being the most prominent. But Turnbull and Bishop have adopted a correctly sceptical posture toward Beijing that supports Australia’s interests. The fact that the China Lobby’s many wings — from business people to academics to former politicians to the Sinophiles in DFAT — don’t like this, merely reflects their own interest in pushing Beijing’s line. Whatever else Turnbull has buggered up, he has managed Australia’s relations with China entirely appropriately.
Hyperbole takes the edge off what may be some fair points in your piece Bernard.
Dismissing China as a barbaric nation hell bent on destroying themselves and the world is BS.
We should also be wary of the USA and our symbiotic relationship which is not necessarily always in our best interests.
It;s all much more complicated than you make out.
Tick, RL.
Folks like BK seem to have forgotten or neglected all history.
P.S. While it’s all fine and dandy to express our sovereign right to choose who we fancy to influence our great democracy, the best of diplomats can actually chew gum and walk at the same time, a skill not evident from Mal Equipped and Julesewry, on down.
As things are currently trending, we might need to consider a change of name for DFAT e.g. Department of Fuck All Trade.
But, what the hell, who needs China? We can just ramp up our weapons and private contractor sales to the likes of the House of Saud, the UAE etc.
Might need to send the gear sans any ‘batch or serial numbers’, however. Wouldn’t want them showing up in any White Helmets productions, now would we?
2013 – https://edition.cnn.com/2013/09/12/politics/syria-arming-rebels/index.html
2015 – https://edition.cnn.com/2015/10/12/politics/syria-rebel-groups-ammunition-50-tons/index.html
However, to properly insert ourselves in this supply chain, we should look at establishing a relationship with the Keisler Police Supply Co of Indiana, USA.
https://amityunderground.com/international-arms-watchdog-finds-that-most-isis-weaponry-was-purchased-by-the-united-states-and-saudi-arabia-before-being-shipped-to-opposition-forces-in-syria-and-iraq-isis-arms-kieslerpolicesupply/#comments
That investigation is not being carried out by some crank ‘conspiracy theory’ roustabouts, it’s being carried out by the “EU-funded Conflict Armament Research”.
The likes of BK can bang on all they like about the likes of China, but we remain a long way shy of ‘holier than thou’.
Hyperbole it is RL. And as you say . . . mostly BS.
Perhaps Malcolm Turnbull-faced by even more negative polls-should forfeit the job of PM and be shifted to Foreign Affairs and Julie Bishop-who assails us from the rigours of the socially aware pages of the press-could be given Rural Affairs, or be made Minister for Ageing (a job she held previously in the early 2000s). And Barnaby Joyce be given the order of the boot.
“China is a brutal, murderous dictatorship that is aggressively expansionist in its own region, brainwashes its young people into a kind of aggrieved Sinofascist narrative, and has regularly tried to interfere, usually unsuccessfully, in Australian politics.”
You may well be right Bernard, I don’t travel enough to know first hand, and can’t say which angle holds the most truth, however most of those words apply to the USA over the past 50 years, with us as its subservient lackey. Change the words ‘dictatorship to pseudo-democratic oligarchy’, ‘Sinofascist to radical neoliberalism’, and ‘unsuccessfully to successfully’, and you have described the US.
Brutal, murderous – the US kills how many of its own citizens with the death penalty, imprisons how many of its third strike small time criminals (mostly Afro-American and Hispanics) to life in prison, interferes in how many regions for what ends?
Perhaps the question isn’t why we should keep them at a distance, but why we don’t keep the US at a similar distance.
Or am I out of line on that?
No DB : you are “bang on”! Consistency in politics – huh. Forcing the point : whatever one might think (depending upon their source for information) of Chinese presidents every president of the USA since Kennedy could be convicted of a War Crime. Even Obama was an accessory to murder over bin Laden.
As an aside, it was a defense at Nuremberg that if the Allies had acted so any similar accusation towards an Axis member would would not be pursued.
Oh, O’Bomber’s due for more ‘credit’ than just “accessory”, Kyle.
‘Kill List Tuesdays’ in the White House ring a bell?
Just tick a box, and off go the drones – and kill a helluva lot more than the one who got the tick – ‘Weddings, Parties, Anything’ – that’s O’Bomber, the Nobel Peace Prize ‘winner’.
Still, he did grow up in Indonesia, while his Mum worked for the Ford Foundation, who were ably assisting the coup in Indonesia that resulted in, what, a million deaths?
Very strong grounding in his formative years.
China is on the boil, and no mistake. It took 50 years for them to reach this position in the world, and they don’t intend wasting a single minute from here on in.
Still, China’s military budget is only a quarter of the United States’. It is still build-up time for another couple of decades at least. Wait and watch.
I am really over tired boring old white men trying to whip up a new cold war, it’s over. The most brutal nations on earth are the US, UK, Israel and China far down that list.