In the space of two months, the growing importance of the Chinese community in Australia’s electoral politics has been emphasised by two election campaigns, one state and one federal.
The federal campaign has thus far seen: a candidates’ debate, for the first time, conducted in Mandarin; a related flare-up over a Liberal candidate’s efforts to court social conservative sentiment within the community; a faux pas from a prime minister who had felt it worth his while to commit the Mandarin word for “hello” to memory; and, earlier this week, Kevin Rudd’s first constructive service to the ALP in many a long year, when he put his language skills to use in a street walk through Hurstville in Sydney.
This follows a New South Wales election that reached a turning point when it was revealed Labor leader Michael Daley had raised concerns about the impact of Asian immigration on Sydney’s employment and housing markets.
Weight of numbers alone should suffice to establish that the growing Chinese communities of Sydney and Melbourne demand that politicians sit up and take notice.
Between the censuses of 2006 and 2016, Chinese language speakers went from 2.6% of the Australian population to nearly 4%.
Chinese-Australians also punch above their weight in the parties’ strategic calculations when compared with other migrant communities who established themselves in low-income suburbs and adopted the locally prevalent tendency to vote Labor.
As well as being conspicuous elements of a number of key marginal seats, Chinese communities represent the first wave of immigration that the Liberals have been able to view with equanimity since the post-war arrival of anti-communist Balts that famously displeased Gough Whitlam.
However, it wasn’t always thus. Labor won enduring loyalty among many Chinese voters after the Hawke government allowed students to stay in Australia after the Tiananmen Square massacre, and John Howard did lasting damage with his suggestion that Asian immigration should be curtailed during his first stint as leader in 1988.
When Howard himself suffered his historic defeat in Bennelong in 2007, the result was widely attributed to the transformative effect of Chinese immigration on the once white middle-class electorate.
Increasingly though, the rise of China’s middle class is bringing affluent new arrivals with economic priorities to match, together with a measure of cultural resistance to the broader community’s progressive turn on sex and gender issues.
These developments were reflected to some extent in voting patterns for the 2017 same-sex marriage survey — and also in Labor’s persistent failure to repeat its win in Bennelong, where a Chinese community already considered decisive in 2007 has since doubled in size.
After Bennelong, the three seats with the highest Chinese populations all gave the Liberals crucial victories amid their otherwise dispiriting performance at the 2016 election.
This included the historically Labor seats of Banks and Reid in Sydney, where the Liberals held on even as the more typically marginal seats on the city’s fringes fell away.
Still more remarkably, the Melbourne seat of Chisholm, which has been the focal point of the influx in the city’s eastern suburbs over the past two decades, was the only seat in the country the Liberals gained from Labor.
Nonetheless, Labor is confident these results don’t represent a trend that will continue through to the coming election.
A finely targeted pitch has been made through its promise to trump the government on visas for migrant families’ elderly parents, and the party has improved its ground game to the extent of recognising the significance of the Chinese language social media service WeChat, on which it was blindsided by a campaign against it in 2016.
The architect of that campaign, Gladys Liu, is now running as a candidate, trying to keep Chisholm in the Liberal fold after the messy departure of Julia Banks. But reports have consistently indicated that Liberal strategists do not fancy her chances.
However, it may be a different story in the Sydney seats, where the Liberals are hoping the damage done to the Labor brand by Michael Daley’s imprudent observations will prove to be enduring.
I am very involved in the Chinese community in Adelaide through my partner. I first started seeing spurious, scare based messages, untrue statements about the ALP etc some three months ago. I wrote to Bill Shorten, Penny Wong and a host of other ALP MPs but not one took me seriously. I am an atheist but my partner is a Christian. Her Chinese church actively promotes the LNP. Her friends all ‘follow the leader’’ when it comes to group chats on WeChat etc . I worked out at the time that the Chinese vote could be as high as 5% of the vote in several electorates, enough to ‘swing’ the outcome. I am sure the majority of Chinese votes will support the LNP because of effective fear messages and appealing to the hip pocket. Blatant lies are circulating unchallenged. The ALP has been stupid ignoring this factor.
John Amadio
Remembering on the ’89 Hawke decision allowing any (55,000?) Chinese visitor to stay, I’m curious to know what percentage that cohort and their immediate families represent, if any, in the above figures? At the time there were dire warnings about the impact on the immigration program, Australia’s future etc.
My own view is that they probably don’t represent a significant percentage of the overall Chinese population able to vote, not all of the 55,000 offered the chance to stay after Tiananmen Square stayed, it was about 30 years ago which means they have been influenced by other factors by now and of course, just because Hawke did it doesn’t mean those who benefitted would necessarily be supportive of the ALP.
55,000 was big at the time but the estimated number of Chinese people in Australia now is about 1,000, 000.
As an impact on immigration overall? I reckon very small.
I had no idea of those numbers, both overall and electorate concentrations.
Don’t count out the voices of young people of Chinese heritage. I was very impressed with the effort of that generation in terms of their preparedness to effectively engage with the same sex marriage campaign against all of the typical stereotypes your article suggests..
I am sure that is true, but the younger generation doesn’t have as broad a range of resources as the older generation, who could fund print campaigns as well as social media, word of mouth, and who had the institutional support of Chinese churches.
I was in Taiwan (which had a similar SSM campaign to Australia) just before the plebiscite, and kept asking the SSM-supporting groups over there for posters and materials that I could bring back with me! Fortunately they weren’t needed over here and I think they need them over there now. 🙁
I agree with you. I am not sure that young Chinese are any more engaged with the politics here than other young Aussies.,
If not, I know many will just follow parents voting . I have already seen it with pre and postal voting.
I think the voting power of the Chinese community has been under estimated by the ALP.
I don’t think though, any will be taking direction from Beijing.
Many though do , love money.
As far as I know, it is still pretty frowned upon in China to be gay and the older community are really pretty conservative.
Let us hope that the Chinese community in Australia are here because they want to be Australian, and are not influenced by the country they chose to leave. By all means vote for the party that best represents their own needs, but not one that that their old homeland directs.
I hope you are correct. I also hope they are enrolled in large numbers. My experience, admittedly, is mainly with 40+ Chinese folks.