Good old Kevin07. Check out his latest offering:
Now that Anthony Albanese has broken the unprecedented six-year deep freeze with China, it is tempting to imagine that all our disputes with Beijing will evaporate in short order. This would be a mistake.
…Australia’s relationship with China is shaped by the emergence of a bipartisan US doctrine of strategic competition over the last five years, and will be influenced by future developments in US politics – especially if future presidential elections provide a launchpad for more isolationist candidates than we have seen in the past.
Our relations are also affected by China’s changing direction under its ideologue-in-chief Xi Jinping, who has steered his society towards the Leninist left through expanded party control, his economy towards the Marxist left through more decisive state intervention, and his country’s foreign and security more to the nationalist right.
…Without reflecting at length on Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton’s megaphone diplomacy toward Beijing, it’s clear that such rhetorical overdrive did nothing to produce a considered and substantive national China strategy, let alone an effective policy or operational response to meet the China challenge.
This megaphone diplomacy was ultimately performance art designed to secure political support within the Liberal-National coalition, coupled with a ham-fisted effort to wedge the Labor party as somehow weak on national security – a policy that failed spectacularly at the May election.
By contrast, the Albanese government has sought to bring down the temperature of the Australia-China relationship, an approach that has been matched by Beijing’s toning down of its own rhetoric towards Australia. By putting the megaphone away, both sides have taken a healthy step to restoring stability, and perhaps even the beginnings of normality, to the diplomatic relationship.
…The next five years will very much shape, and arguably determine, the future stability of the Indo-Pacific region. If we fail to navigate these years carefully, there is grave risk that we will find ourselves on the brink of an armed conflict of a scale not seen since the second world war, which killed tens of millions.
Riiiight…so, the prescience of successive Coalition governments in identifying the bellicose shift in China, and reframing its burgeoning tyranny for the Australian people, was nothing more than wedge politics. But when Kevin07 does the same thing, in virtually the very next sentence, that’s prescience.
Let’s revisit a few facts. The diplomatic freeze began in 2016 when Malcolm Turnbull used the corruption of Labor’s Sam Dastayari to launch a domestic pushback against state-sponsored Chinese influence-peddling. Labor resisted it.
Then the new Morrison Government continued the pushback in coordination with allies against dodgy Chinese IT firms. Labor resisted that too.
Then we got COVID. As the Chinese state siphoned off Aussie PPE, Labor was busy lighting up landmarks in sympathetic communist red.
As the Morrison Government demanded transparency on COVID origins so that we might avoid another pandemic, Labor resisted.
Then, as China intensified its trade war on Australia to bully it back from all the above positions, Labor again blamed Australia.
Finally, when Morrison ripped the mask off the evil CCP by goading it into issuing the 14 demands to end democracy, the most fundamental attack on Aussie liberalism since Japan took Singapore, and the critical document in uniting the liberal world behind Australia, Labor blamed Australia.
I could go on. But the basic truth of it is this. The Coalition recognised that China had changed (or saw it for what it really was) long before Labor did. Arguably, it was only the prospect of being stranded on an unelectable pro-Chinese limb six months from the May poll that forced Albanese to change his China spots.
Undoubtedly, the Morrison Government was rubbish in many ways. But it left Australia one great legacy when it exposed Beijing and the CCP for what it is: an evil and bullying racist tyranny that has designs on warping the global liberal system to its baleful needs.
It’s time that Kevin07 and Labor recognised this Coalition contribution to Aussie freedom and gave up on the wedge politics itself.
