The decision the Morrison government must take soon on how it responds to the Chinese regime’s crackdown on Hong Kong is not uncomplicated, but should be fairly clear. For moral, economic, foreign policy and political reasons, Australia must follow the UK in offering some form of sanctuary to large numbers of Hong Kong citizens.
The first step should be granting extensions to the temporary visas of all ~17,000 Hong Kong residents currently in Australia if they do not wish to return. As Labor says, no one should be deported to Hong Kong now.
Beyond that, Australia needs to determine how, and how many, Hong Kong residents who wish to escape the clutches of Beijing should be permitted to come here.
A Chinese University survey last year, as protests roiled Hong Kong, found around 40% of the city’s 7.4 million people would emigrate if they had the chance.
The UK has now offered around 3 million Hong Kong residents born prior to the handover to China residency in the UK — a significant expansion of UK immigration rights. But those born after 1997 — which includes the core of the current protest movement — don’t benefit from that. That may be where Australia should focus its efforts.
There’s already a large Hong Kong diaspora in Australia, concentrated in Sydney: around 90,000 Hong Kong-born people resided in Australia in 2016, about half in NSW.
What makes it easier for the government is that there could literally be no better time to invite large numbers of people to move to Australia from a territory being crushed by China. Indeed, given the government’s rhetoric about China, to do anything other than offer sanctuary would open Scott Morrison to a charge of hypocrisy.
With Australia’s permanent and temporary immigration programs frozen due to the COVID-19 pandemic, our dependence on migration to prop up the economy with demand for infrastructure and housing has left us in a deep hole. There’ll be no 160,000 skilled and family visa arrivals this year, and no hundreds of thousands of foreign students and temporary workers.
The construction sector is the primary victim, and is already undergoing a major downturn, but the impacts of virtually zero immigration will ripple out across the economy. The crisis in Hong Kong coincides with Australia, in effect, requiring its entire migration program to be filled. And Hong Kong has handled the pandemic far better than Australia, with just seven deaths and 1200 infections in total.
Other economic benefits are also apparent: by targeting younger Hongkongers, Australia would be inviting young, well-educated migrants, but the Hong Kong population has a higher level of tertiary education overall than Australia anyway; the local Hong Kong diaspora already here is better educated, better skilled and has a higher participation rate than locally-born Australians.
By declaring its willingness to offer Hongkongers sanctuary from a monstrous regime, Australia would inevitably infuriate China, but relations with Beijing are already at a long-term low due to the latter’s increased aggression, Australia’s pushback against Chinese interference and the COVID-19 inquiry issue.
With no prospect of an improvement in relations with China unless Australia complies with the wishes of local China Lobby voices and bends the knee to Beijing, there is less downside than usual in further upsetting a regime permanently poised to take offence at the most trivial slight.
Australia could do little if China decided to prevent Hongkongers from leaving, but such an act would, more than anything else, signal the failure of a political model touted as superior to the lazy democracies of the West. When a regime has to imprison its own population — which Beijing is already doing to the Xinjiang Uyghurs in a slow-motion genocide — it signals a moral, economic and social failure on a vast scale.
The only complication is that such an act of generosity would raise questions about why, exactly, Australia is willing to offer sanctuary to well-educated, urban, often Anglophone Chinese heritage people while people in other persecuted groups around the world from Muslim, rural and uneducated backgrounds, such as Rohingya refugees from Myanmar or Shia refugees from Syria, aren’t welcome.
The best way to address that is to ensure that our intake from Hong Kong is in addition to our planned humanitarian intake. If done right, Australia can confirm its self-proclaimed status as the world’s most successful multicultural society, help the victims of a tyrannical regime and boost its economy all at once.
Yes. And while they’re at it, they could let a tiny family return home to Biloela.
Surely the bigger test for “I stopped these” Scotty from marketing will be what he & the spud do with any people who manage to escape From HK on boats and make it to our shores.
I was thinking the same thing. If the Chinese really wanted to mess with Morrison, Dutton and Pezzullo’s minds, they could start issuing Hong Kong Passports to Rohingyas before they set off by sea to escape the brutality in Myanmar and the miserable camps in Bangladesh, or even just to those already in Malaysia and Indonesia.
The 2011 revision and extension of the original 2002 UN Security Council resolution;
https://www.un.org/securitycouncil/sanctions/1267/aq_sanctions_list/summaries/entity/eastern-turkistan-islamic-movement
EASTERN TURKISTAN ISLAMIC MOVEMENT
In accordance with paragraph 36 of resolution 2161 (2014) , the Al-Qaida Sanctions Committee makes accessible a narrative summary of reasons for the listing for individuals, groups, undertakings and entities included in the Al-Qaida Sanctions List.
QDe.088
EASTERN TURKISTAN ISLAMIC MOVEMENT
Date on which the narrative summary became available on the Committee’s website:
7 April 2011
Reason for listing:
The Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement was listed on 11 September 2002 pursuant to paragraphs 1 and 2 of resolution 1390 (2002) as being associated with Al-Qaida, Usama bin Laden or the Taliban for “participating in the financing, planning, facilitating, preparing or perpetrating of acts or activities by, in conjunction with, under the name of, on behalf or in support of” or “otherwise supporting acts or activities of” Al-Qaida (QDe.004).
Additional information:
The Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) is an organization which has used violence to further its aim of setting up an independent so-called “East Turkistan” within China. Since its establishment, ETIM has maintained close ties with the Taliban, Al-Qaida (QDe.004) and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (QDe.010). It was founded by Hasan Mahsum from Xinjiang, China, who was killed by Pakistani troops in October 2003. ETIM is currently led by Abdul Haq (QDi.268), who was also a member of Al-Qaida’s Shura Council as of 2005…..
ETIM is currently active in South Asia, Central Asia and the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China.
In recent years, ETIM has set up bases outside China to train terrorists and has dispatched its members to China to plot and execute terrorist acts including bombing buses, cinemas, department stores, markets and hotels. ETIM has also undertaken assassinations and arson attacks and has carried out terrorist attacks against Chinese targets abroad. Among the violent acts committed by ETIM members were the blowing up of the warehouse of the Urumqi Train Station on 23 May 1998, the armed looting of 247,000 RMB Yuan in Urumqi on 4 February 1999, an explosion in Hetian City, Xinjiang, on 25 March 1999 and violent resistance against arrest in Xinhe County, Xinjiang, on 18 June 1999. These incidents resulted in the deaths of 140 people and injuries to 371…..”
Further, in 2013 – https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/25/islamist-china-tiananmen-beijing-attack
“Islamist group claims responsibility for attack on China’s Tiananmen Square
Group releases eight-minute audio clip which warns of future attacks in Beijing
A radical Islamist group has claimed responsibility for an attack on Tiananmen Square last month and warned of future attacks in the Chinese capital, according to an eight-minute audio clip obtained by a US-based internet monitoring organisation.
The Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) is the first group to claim responsibility for the attack on 28 October, when a four-wheel drive vehicle ploughed through a group of pedestrians near the iconic square in central Beijing, crashed into a stone bridge and caught fire, killing five people and injuring dozens. Chinese authorities quickly identified the driver as Uighur, a Muslim ethnic minority hailing from Xinjiang, a sparsely populated, restive region in the country’s far north-west.
“O Chinese unbelievers, know that you have been fooling East Turkistan for the last sixty years, but now they have awakened,” the organisation’s leader Abdullah Mansour said in the clip, which was posted online this weekend by the Search for International Terrorist Entities Institute (SITE), a Bethesda, Maryland-based website which monitors jihadist forums. Uighur separatists call the region East Turkistan……”
The “Turkistan Islamic Party” is a reinvented/successor version of the “East Turkistan Islamic Party” covered by the UNSC resolution mentioned previously.
2018 – https://jamestown.org/program/returning-uighur-fighters-and-chinas-national-security-dilemma/
“Returning Uighur Fighters and China’s National Security Dilemma
In early 2017, CCP Secretary General President Xi Jinping announced his desire to build a “Great Wall of Iron” to apparently promote security and peace in China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (Xinhua, March 10, 2017). This is likely a continuation Beijing’s focus on implementing strict security measures in the region since deadly 2009 riots in the region’s capital city of Urumqi. However, it also comes at the same time that China faces a new challenge in the form of Syrian-trained Uighurs potentially returning to Xinjiang (China Brief, September 21, 2017).
Western nations also face challenges with radicalized fighters returning to their home countries, as IS is gradually eliminated and the war in Syria winds down. China’s returning fighter challenge, however, is also linked with the al-Qaeda affiliated Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP) which has been active in Syria and had as many as several thousand Chinese Uighur members (South China Morning Post, December 12, 2017). The Islamist radicalization of some of these fighters while abroad has also helped build links of solidarity between them and the broader global Islamic terror community.
Pressure may be increasingly mounting on Uighurs in Syria as Idlib, the location where they are believed to be concentrated….”
What’s your point? This article was about accepting immigrants from Hong Kong, unless you’re intimating these immigrants could potentially be terrorists? I read we took about 25,000 Vietnamese boat people back in the 70s. I can’t think of a better example of how well that turned for Australia.
Just presenting facts. Keane keeps banging on about Chinese tyranny and, like many pig ignorant fans of Yank/Limey empire, ignores the fact that OBL frequently visited Xinjiang to wind up the radical Islamists in China – who have executed many, many terrorist attacks that would have anyone in West foaming at the mouth, if those attacks had occurred in the West.
Read the whole of the UN Security Council resolution I provided above.
People like Keane love to rail about the ‘rules based order’, and ‘Western Values’.
Yeah, well, stuff that – go and read International Law, which IS the supposed basis of the ‘rules based order’, established in the aftermath of WWII, and make an ‘estimate’ of how frequently it is the West that completely ignores International Law, and just does whatever the hell it fancies.
Every goddamn set of sanctions unilaterally applied by the Yanks, and backed by gutless frauds like this country, WITHOUT a UN resolution, is a breach of International Law – Venezuela, Iran, Syria, Bolivia, Ecuador – how much time ya got?
As was the ‘Coalition of the Willing’s’ destruction of Iraq, which was launched bypassing the UN Security Council – breach of International Law, and a “War of Aggression”.
Afghanistan, ditto. The destruction of Libya – ditto. I got heaps of dittos.
Make up your own mind.
Would you like me to present you with numerous photos of Joshua Wong greeting ‘visiting’ badged up Stepan Bandera neo-Nazi fans from Ukraine, in Hong Kong, and bagging Lebron James as a ‘communist sympathiser’, because he chose to support the BLM protests, without bundling up the Hong Kong protesters in the same basket?
Do you even know where the chieftains of both the Hong Kong protest movement, and the Uighur separatist movement are HQ’d – try Washington D.C. And, they’re funded by the ‘National Endowment for Democracy’, which used to sit, in its last incarnation, within the CIA.
Go and read something that comes from outside the Ozzie bubble, and you might learn something.
You might also learn something if you read the ‘handover’ agreement signed by China and the remnants of the great British empire, in 1997.
This is the Eurasian century – get used to it.
Bref, this is a malfunctioning Trot-Bot. An archaic model badly in need of repairs.
That all sounds great to me, thanks Bernard.
Yes, we should offer a quota to those not eligible for UK. If some of those are not desired by Beijing, that will soften relations with China.
Yes, in addition to our existing humanitarian quota.
Send the bill to DFAT.
in “desperate need of migrants”? Pardon?
He’s right rumtytum- its been the three card trick thats kept the economy afloat , that and selling resources- and both ‘policies’ are unsustainable. In the absence of any articulated vision, social, industry, from the neoliberal swill that masquerade as economic managers , that the best we got.
Indeed!
What is it then – labour for the building industry (Bernard’s first-mentioned demographic), or “well-educated, urban, often Anglophone Chinese heritage people” who don’t sound to be much use on a building site?
If we are genuinely short of labour, not just cheap nannies and baristas, we should train our own.
The number of refugees and people with good cases for humanitarian settlement is, to all intents and purposes, infinite. Go back six months ago and we were worried about the drought and the fires and (now crowded out of the news) urban infrastructure. Now, there is the possibility of a bit of competitive virtue-signalling by the leaders of Liberal and Labor alike, and we are going to bring in more bodies.
Beat me to it.
But, hey, it’s Keane the undead neolib, what else would one expect.