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April 1, 2025
Tuesday 1 April 2025
Andrew Tillett
The Australian Financial Review
Beijing’s top local diplomat has urged Australia to work closely with China in defiance of US President Donald Trump’s tariff war at the same time as fresh friction in bilateral ties emerged over a Chinese research ship sailing through Bass Strait.
Four days into the election campaign, the national security debate erupted after Labor confirmed authorities were tracking a Chinese “spy ship” sailing along the southern Australian coast.
Analysts warned the civilian vessel, identified as the Tan Suo Yi Hao, was probably surveying the underwater features and the route of the subsea communications cable connecting Perth and Sydney, which runs for almost 5000 kilometres.
A month after a flotilla of Chinese warships completed a near-circumnavigation of the Australian mainland, the Tan Suo Yi Hao was on Monday afternoon outside Australia’s Exclusive Economic Zone, sailing west across the Great Australian Bight.
The ship entered Australia’s exclusive economic zone on March 27. It is now currently about 852 kilometres west-south-west of Adelaide.
The government conceded it was unable to prevent its journey but insisted the ship was acting in accordance with international law while the Australian Defence Force and Border Force monitored it.
“I would prefer that it wasn’t there,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said during a press conference in Perth.
“But we live in circumstances where, just as Australia has vessels in the South China Sea and vessels in the Taiwan Strait and a range of areas, this vessel is there.”
Opposition home affairs spokesman James Paterson said Albanese had struck a false moral equivalence by comparing China’s “unwelcome” research vessel to Australian military activities in the South China Sea.
“Bass Strait and the Great Australian Bight are not hotly contested international waterways with disputed legal claims. Nor has Australia been trawling the deep seabed off China’s coast with dual-purpose vessels,” he said.
The presence of the Tan Suo Yi Hao injected another element of foreign policy and national security into an election campaign set against the backdrop of Trump’s disruption of geopolitics.
On the eve of Trump’s threatened imposition of sweeping reciprocal tariffs on trading partners on Wednesday (Thursday AEDT) – which he has dubbed “Liberation Day” – Chinese Ambassador to Australia Xiao Qian said as beneficiaries of free trade, Australia and China should work together with the international community to support globalisation, uphold the international trading system and promote trade liberalisation.
“The United States’ imposition of tariffs on multiple countries, including China and Australia, seriously tramples the international free trade system centred on the World Trade Organisation and disrupts the stability of global industrial and supply chains,” Xiao told The Australian Financial Review.
“This not only hinders global economic recovery and development, but also offers no benefits to the United States or its people, and will inevitably meet the joint opposition of the international community.”
While the government is in caretaker mode, trade officials remain in the dark about whether Trump will impose reciprocal duties on Australian products amid mixed messages from the White House. Beef and pharmaceuticals are Australia’s top export categories to the US.
In a weekend interview, Trump said he would only negotiate tariff exemptions with countries prepared to “give us something of great value”.
A government source speaking on the condition of anonymity cautioned that even when Trump makes an announcement it could take some time for the full details to emerge and there was potential for further changes.
Trump has already imposed 25pc tariffs on Australian aluminium and steel exported to the US. The Albanese government has ruled out concessions on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme or easing biosecurity requirements to avoid Trump’s tariffs.
Former Home Affairs Department secretary Michael Pezzullo said China would not see any contradiction between its desire to deepen economic co-operation with Australia at the same time as it roused anger with maritime incursions.
“From our point of view, it is something that we will need to accept as being an increasingly frequent occurrence. We won’t get anywhere with them by expressing any form of ‘hurt’, given our stabilised bilateral relationship. Our position should be flint-like: if we had to, we would defend ourselves,” said Pezzullo, who also authored the 2009 defence white paper.
A Chinese research vessel last mapped waters off the WA coast in 2020 used by Australian submarines. But the arrival of the research vessel has attracted heightened attention after Chinese and Russian ships have been implicated in a spate of unjdersea cables being damaged in Europe and Taiwan in recent months.
The Chinese flotilla in February sparked a fresh wave of tensions between Canberra and Beijing after the Albanese government complained the Chinese gave inadequate notice of live firing drills in conducted in international waters in the Tasman Sea that disrupted flights between Australia and New Zealand.
The flotilla also exposed how stretched the military had become with its ageing and shrinking fleet of warships, with the opposition slamming the government over the fact that a Virgin pilot first informed Defence of the live firing drill.
Trade Minister Don Farrell said the government continued to strongly advocate for Australia’s interests with the Trump administration.
“We will always stand up for Australia, and we are prepared for any outcome on April 2nd,” he said.
“Let me be clear, we will never trade away the things that make us the best country in the world.”
China’s embassy in Canberra declined to comment on the Tan Suo Yi Hao’s presence, but Xiao rejected criticism of last month’s naval deployment.
He said that while the Chinese naval fleet operated in “full compliance with international laws and established practices”, Australian military aircraft and warships in the South China Sea aimed to deliberately provoke disputes and sow discord between China and regional countries.
The Tan Suo Yi Hao is equipped with a submersible vessel capable of diving 10 kilometres beneath the surface. It had been conducting genuine research with Kiwi scientists of deep sea trenches off New Zealand’s west coast
Maritime navigation websites show the Tan Suo Yi Hao sailed through Bass Strait last week and entered Australia’s exclusive economic zone.
Pezzullo said the Tan Suo Yi Hao would almost certainly have been tasked by China’s military to survey the Southern Ocean.
“The only reason why you’d be interested in the Southern Ocean are for cables, for the oceanography of the subsea surface, in other words for the best place for your submarines to manoeuvre and the hydrography, which is the thermal layering of the water levels which affects your sonar.
“In one sense, we shouldn’t feel special. They’re doing this everywhere. But what does it tell you? It tells you that they’re developing options to be able to operate militarily in places as widely flung as the Southern Ocean.”
Former army brigadier and University of NSW professor Ian Langford said the survey ship would have had two aims as it gathered intelligence.
“The first is any sign of military sensor capability on the sea floor, and the other is it is seeking to understand our undersea infrastructure and how vulnerable we may or may not be to disruption, given thatAustralia relies on undersea cabling for 95 per cent of its information transfer between it and the rest of the world,” Langford said.
“We think we traditionally own that part of the world. That is no longer the case.”