Andrew Hastie’s screed against China, which incurred the wrath of the Chinese government — a regime that has a very low wrath threshold — is, like the MP himself, a curate’s egg.
Correctly identifying Chinese aggression, willingness to interfere in other countries and desire to reshape the international order on its own terms as reasons for alarm, Hastie then promptly went completely overboard with a full Godwin Plus. China is not merely Nazi Germany ready to storm around our Maginot Line of democracy, he warns, but the Stalinist Soviet Union as well. Strange he didn’t make room for imperial Japan or Pol Pot in there as well.
Except, if China really were some unspeakable combination of Nazis and Stalinists, the required response would be clear. Hastie proposes no solutions of any kind to the dilemma of what to do when your dominant economic partner is also your worst enemy. In fact it’s not even clear what he thinks the problems in our handling of China are. “Right now our greatest vulnerability lies not in our infrastructure, but in our thinking. That intellectual failure makes us institutionally weak,” he says. Exactly what that intellectual failure precisely is, and what the institutions are that are weak, is never spelled out. As an essay, it wouldn’t have managed even a credit if undergraduate Hastie had handed it in during his Arts degree at UNSW.
(Of course, our universities are weak — because we don’t fund them. We force them to lower their standards in order to attract a lucrative stream of foreign students, including from China, and accept funding for wildly inappropriate, non-academic foreign bodies like “Confucius Institutes”, leaving them open to influence by foreign governments and providing a campus presence for pro-regime activists inimical to academic freedom. There’s a clear case of Hastie’s intellectual/institutional failure, but don’t expect either side of politics to stop worshipping at the altar of education exports).
Scott Morrison took a rather dismissive view. “Andrew, of course, is not a minister within the government and he is free to make comments he wishes to make as a member of the backbench,” the Prime Minister said, “and so he entirely entitled to provide his perspective.”
Except, Hastie isn’t just another backbencher, he’s chair of parliament’s most important committee, the intelligence and security committee, so his comments carry the kind of weight, particularly with overseas observers, that those of dopey logorrheics like Craig Kelly do not. He is in a position to apply his views to the work of a committee charged with overseeing — if only in a limited sense — security and intelligence matters.
As Crikey reported last week, the intelligence and security committee is currently in the government’s bad books, with Peter Dutton claiming that, in effect, it is a national security threat because it keeps watering down security legislation. Dutton’s claims are a direct insult to Hastie’s chairmanship and the work of its Liberal and Labor members.
Tension between Hastie and Dutton won’t have been helped by the thoroughgoing demolition of Home Affairs by the committee last Friday when the department made an ill-prepared appearance before Hastie’s committee as part of a review of the government’s original, Abbott-era foreign fighter legislation.
One of the persistent problems in the bureaucrats’ appearance was their inability or unwillingness to say that the government’s laws on revoking the citizenship of dual citizens who had engaged in terrorism had actually been effective in making Australians safer. This led to an exchange between Labor’s Mark Dreyfus — the central villain of Dutton’s smear of the committee — and Home Affairs bureaucrat Derek “citizenship is a privilege not a right” Bopping. Dreyfus asked if the section of the department’s submission to the inquiry entitled “Effectiveness of the provisions” actually said they were, you know, effective. Bopping refused to say, despite being asked no less than seven times, whether they were effective.
It wasn’t just Dreyfus, of course: pretty much everyone present got stuck into them, Labor and Liberal alike. Labor’s Mike Kelly had an extended exchange with Bopping where he tried to get the bureaucrat to consider the basic idea that an Australian terrorist prevented from returning to Australia might target Australians overseas, but such a concept seemed beyond his public service brain.
No wonder at the end of proceedings Hastie, who had kept out of the fray for the most part, made this blunt observation about the argument for the citizenship revocation provisions: “I think that’s a pretty strong case to be made. I had hoped you would have made a stronger case, in fact.”
Hastie is not a happy camper. He takes national security seriously, rather than treating it as a partisan plaything used for wedging Labor, like Dutton and Morrison do. The government may discover that Hastie being “free to make comments he wishes to make as a member of the backbench” might see more than just a spray at the butchers of Beijing — particularly if it continues to smear his committee.
What did you make of Andrew Hastie’s comments about China? Write to boss@crikey.com.au and let us know.
It’s good to know that MP’s are aware of the issues but Hastie has done a Trump. This is more about shoring up the redneck sympathy within the electorate than being a good MP: Dutton’s quick comments only reinforce this concept.
And Hastie’s experience in the SAS is somewhat soft in my opinion. Whilst there are great soldiers in the elite SAS from Swanbourne, I’m sadly confident that the unit has been very slow to recover from the Black Hawke incident in 1996.
Yesterday a “Chicken Stangler” Today a smooth Politician. Good guy to have on your side in a Party Room Coup d’etat.
Lol
I came in to write about hands and fingerprints.
But found you were already here.
Thankyou
#toxicSas
The SAS are profiled and trained.
They are moving into all sorts of positions of power.
They have an overblown sense of their own power which fits their roles in the colonial white patriarchy.
We must out them like we out the core climate criminals. Thanks BK.
A strongly religious hand collector. He just loves hands. He is a miracle in his own right, a liberal party eye blinking and talking maggot.
Lets not be coy about this, scummo knows full well what Hastie is up to and he`s behind it all the way , he`s toadying up to Donnie the Dump by bagging china and hoping the chinese dont take the axe to our coal and Iron ore in the process , risky business indeed as the Chinese are way smarter than a snake oil salesman and a circus clown like those pair of economic despots are ever likely to be.
If we are to be intellectually honest in confronting what words really mean, as Hastie urges, how then should the utterances of Trump, Pompeo and the rest of the USA criminal deadshits be taken?
How then to interpret the drivel of home grown deadshits Morrison, Hastie, etc ad infinitum?
Trained killer Hastie likes to imagine he’s Winston redux, scorning limp wristed appeasers and spilling bodily fluids for the sake of the nation. But he’s a collaborator, a fluffer for other killers, merchants of violence, pollution and distraction.
And you, Trixie, are today’s winner, given I couldn’t have said it better, meself.
You scored ‘BONUS POINTS!’ for “a fluffer for other killers”.
By jingo by crikey, you have nailed it! That Hastie chap is a really dense, nasty piece of work! The Tony Abbott captains pick.
Apparently he is very religious. Would sort of fit the LNP political mould very well. Next thing Bibles and Guns!
Hastie has proven himself unsuitable for membership of the security committee.
Hastie is one of our more extreme religious right wing politicians. I fear that those who hold fundamentalist religious beliefs, or even those that have been indoctrinated from birth into their family’s religion, are compromised in their capability for rational thought. We have far too many of our politicians holding strong religious beliefs, on both sides, but especially on the right.
True, too true.
Hastie does perhaps miss the mark as far as his comments go comparing China to the Nazi’s.
I mean how can a few 100,000 ethnic Muslims in detention, or the lack of social freedoms in Nepal (or Hong Kong), compare to the Nazi’s?
He is however, somewhat correct to alert us to the ongoing “danger” in the way China is just pushing ahead with it’s agenda to exert greater strategic political, economic and military control over larger areas of the globe, which appears to include areas close to mainland Australia and on Antarctica.
Meanwhile, our politicians appear to vacillate and continue to appease China’s ambitions because of concerns about affecting trade with China.
I mean not like the things past and present the motherfuckers got up to in Vietnam, Cambodia. Laos, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syri, Yemen, soon Iran no doubt Venezuela. I forgot they’re there to bring democracy and to build schools and hospitals.