New Labor China apologist sets about killing “Australia”

Meet Madeleine King, Labor’s new China apologist:

Opposition trade spokeswoman Madeleine King has targeted high-profile Liberal MP Andrew Hastie, labelling him a political ideologue who is hijacking the debate about Australia’s relationship with China.

But Mr Hastie responded saying she was muddled and asleep at the wheel when it came to Beijing.

Last week Mr Hastie, who is the chairman of Parliament’s intelligence and security committee, called for “push back” against the activities of China in Australia as the coronavirus pandemic exposed the economic costs of “relying too heavily on an authoritarian regime”.

Ms King said the economic relationship with China benefits people in both nations.

She criticised a petition Mr Hastie released on his website calling for people to “take action on Australian sovereignty”.

“If, as Andrew Hastie suggests, Australia should reduce its economic ties with China, I look forward to Andrew explaining his strategy for the future of the Australian economy to the tens of thousands more Australians that will be out of a job should our exports of iron ore, coal, and gas to China be significantly diminished,” Ms King said.

At which point will Ms King agree we need to reduce our China reliance then? When it appoints Gladys Liu prime minister? When it invades Taiwan? When it parks the aircraft carriers off Bateman’s Bay? When it invades the Pilbara?

At some point you have to stand up for your democracy and a few jobs is a small price to pay.

King’s rhetoric is warped by her resources fixation. Where has Hastie suggested we cut off commodity supply? Recently he said:

“Australian institutions, universities, and assets are now contested; our sovereignty and independence will be diminished if we don’t continue to push back.”

Doesn’t say anything about mines in there. Nor should it. It’s possible to keep two ideas in your head at once. We can support the global trading system while setting about rebuilding our sovereign resilience and shrinking the China reliance.

Not according to a one-track-minded King, who wrote in the AFR this week:

A detailed analysis conducted by the reputable Global Trade Alert concludes that widespread concern of a global dependence on a tiny number of exporters of medical personal protective equipment (PPE) is misplaced as there is little evidence for any nation having a stranglehold of the supply of PPE.

…Last year, the Australian government dipped its toes in murky water with Prime Minister Scott Morrison ordering an audit of Australia’s role in international organisations as part of a speech in which he railed against the threat of “negative globalism”.

But as bureaucrats have toiled on the audit, the coronavirus has spread rapidly across the globe, rendering the need for Australia’s involvement in strong global architecture and international alliances even more acute.

Now the Prime Minister speaks of strengthening our “economic sovereignty” as he pushes for a boost in domestic production of some manufactured goods including medical equipment and pharmaceuticals.

…A shortage of respirators, ventilators and other equipment in Australia or elsewhere does not signal a failure of globalisation. It’s a failure by governments to plan adequately for a pandemic emergency.

…Open trade will be an integral component of our economic recovery.

…But while Australia is sometimes pejoratively referred to as Asia’s quarry, our world-leading resources sector is a highly productive model of efficiency that the nation simply cannot do without if we are to recover from the economic ramifications of COVID-19.

Our greatest strength remains the extraordinary resources sector, which continues to meet production targets in the face of the COVID-19 disruption and is on track to export commodities this year worth an astonishing $300 billion.

So it is important to remember that the resources sector and a boosted advanced manufacturing sector will depend on an open global trading system.

Yes, she’s from WA. As for national resilience, she has no idea what she’s talking about. To wit, from the ABC:

As Australia was swept by panic buying and medical shortages this year, the scenes were eerily familiar for one of the country’s most senior military planners.

In a secret meeting only a year earlier, the Defence Department’s director of preparedness Cheryl Durrant and a group of Australian industry leaders had predicted a strikingly similar scenario.

…She says the risks to Australia are snowballing, with climate change, US-China tensions and the rise of nationalist governments among the key threats to global stability.

The report, which Ms Durrant commissioned to plan for the growing threats, lays out a timeline of how Australian essential services would collapse within just three months of a crisis worse than the COVID-19 threat, which would put a halt to global trade.

“If you think of the COVID crisis as a test run, it’s really a critical thing for us to learn from this,” she said.

“The lesson is expect the unexpected.”

As the Defence Department’s director of preparedness and mobilisation, Ms Durrant planned for horror scenarios that would keep most Australians up at night.

Last year, she commissioned a landmark review of Defence planning — the first so-called mobilisation review since the Cold War — to prepare for what the department concluded was an increasingly likely global crisis.

“We saw three main possibilities of that happening: the increasing and escalating effects of climate change and natural disasters; a global power conflict, probably between America and China; and finally a pandemic — one with a much greater death rate than what we’re seeing with the COVID crisis,” Ms Durrant said.

“The review looked at the big issues, like if we had to go to war, do we have enough fuel? Do we have enough energy?

“Can the national supply chains and our national infrastructure support Defence in a war or other crisis?”

To answer her questions, Ms Durrant gathered 17 senior engineers from Australia’s key industries to war-game whether Australia’s supplies could sustain the nation through a prolonged crisis, where global supply chains were severely disrupted.

“We asked, if we had basically a halt on global supply — a couple of steps more demanding than we’re seeing in the current crisis — what would run out in one week, two weeks, one month or three months?” she said.

“We wanted to understand what was the thing we were most vulnerable in.”

The experts were selected by their industry peak body, Engineers Australia, from sectors including health care, electricity, fuel, water, mining and telecommunications.

“Out of this thought experiment, what the group looked at across each of their sectors was what would this mean for their particular sector,” Engineers Australia CEO Dr Bronwyn Evans said.

“They identified that because we’re part of the global supply chain, when the ability for that to continue to function [broke down], you’d start to get shortages, you’d run out of things in areas, for example, like the water supply, like telecommunications.”

The final report by Engineers Australia, obtained by the ABC, laid out a chilling timeline of how Australia’s essential services would break down in an unspecified global crisis.

While the group didn’t look at a pandemic specifically, some of the predictions were eerily accurate.

According to the report, “the workshop delivered the overarching advice that, in the scenario provided, Australia would suffer massive upheaval within one week due to job losses, social unease and [public and industrial] hoarding.”

With at least 90 per cent of Australia’s specialist medical supplies imported, the report found specialist medicines “may be exhausted within days”, with “severe repercussions for public health”.

Within a fortnight, with a restriction of imported medical equipment, “health care would be degraded”.

For Ms Durrant, the report was evidence Australian governments could have been better prepared when the fallout from the pandemic hit the nation’s hospitals, supermarkets and Centrelink queues.

While Ms King is busy burnishing her Davosian credentials, the electorate has well and truly moved on to protecting something we used to call “Australia”.

Why Labor can’t see how out of step it is you’ll have to ask its CCP handler.