June 22, 2024
Paul Bongiorno is a columnist for The Saturday Paper and a 35-year veteran of the Canberra Press Gallery. The first visit of a Chinese premier to Australia in seven years perfectly demonstrated the complexity of the relationship with our biggest customer. It also confirmed that for Australias continued prosperity, accommodating Beijing is not optional.
Two-way trade with China was a record $327 billion in 2023, accounting for 27 per cent of Australias total goods and services trade. Thats higher than our next five trading partners combined, as Minister for Trade Don Farrell is quick to point out.
While the percentage has dropped since the emerging superpower applied trade bans that forced some exporters to seek other markets, China is by far Australias biggest destination for exports and source of export opportunity.
Strategic and defence expert Hugh White says that for the first time in our history our biggest customer is not a mate, as in Britain, or the mate of a mate, as in postwar American ally Japan.
This is a reality the China hawks are finding hard to come to terms with. Former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce was indignant to learn China was cyber spying on our utilities and other assets. As if powers great and small dont indulge in espionage.
Joyce told morning TV, Beijing can take your pandas back, after it was announced a new couple is being sent on an extended loan to Adelaide Zoo. He said Australia was weak for not standing up for itself.
The biggest issue for your kids in the future ... your grandkids, is not a war against the weather, its how we can sustain ourselves with a military superpower thats run by a totalitarian regime, he said.
Joyce seems to be suggesting Australia should have nothing to do with China, the same belligerent attitude that led to his own National Party constituents being hardest hit by trade bans.
Farrell says the winemakers, barley growers, beef producers and miners all want to know whether the Dutton government, if they were to come to power, would go back to where the relationship was or would they support the stabilised relationship established by the Albanese government.
Anthony Albanese could rightly claim the visit by Premier Li Qiang was another important step in stabilising Australias relationship with China. Notice the prime minister was careful not to claim his government had embarked on a process of normalising relations. This is a calculated framing, based on a hard-nosed assessment that while China has abandoned its so-called wolf warrior diplomacy, replacing it with a cuddlier panda variety, this is no return to the way things were five or 10 years ago.
The intervening nosedive in relations triggered particularly by the Morrison governments world-leading call for an independent international inquiry into the origin of Covid-19 and a subsequent attempt to leverage domestic political advantage by attacking China led to fierce retaliation.
Peter Dutton, as defence minister in the 2022 election campaign, conflated the presence of a Chinese warship in international waters, hundreds of kilometres offthe Australian coast, with some sort of threat. Inciting national security fears always plays well for the conservatives, or so the thinking obviously went.
No one in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade doubts the more than $20 billion worth of trade bans would be reapplied should any Australian government repeat this lack of sophistication.
It has taken two years of hard work to undo the damage caused by the Morrison Coalition. Albanese says his government has restored high-level dialogue and engagement with China through our patient, calibrated and deliberate approach.
Allan Behm, an international relations specialist at The Australia Institute, says in foreign affairs it is shared interests that always take precedence over shared values. The Chinese clearly see it is more in their interest to keep importing primarily our commodities and particularly our critical minerals than to be worried by our strategic alliance with the United States.
Diplomacy is all about the application of intelligence and tact in the pursuit of convergent interests, says Behm.
We got a sense of the new status quo from Premier Li on his arrival in Adelaide. He said Beijing was seeking common ground while shelving differences in order to achieve mutually beneficial cooperation between the two nations.
Dutton in his formal speech at a state luncheon reciprocated these sentiments, telling Li his delegation was most welcome here as dear friends and guests. He added that he hoped the tensions of recent years can ameliorate.
Dutton sought to repair his relationship with Chinese Australians in his speech, aware they deserted the Coalition at the last election. He celebrated them and noted they have helped to build our nation.
Labors Jerome Laxale in Bennelong says anger at Morrison and Dutton played a big part in him winning the seat from the Liberals in 2022. He says he was elected because Chinese Australians wanted Labor to restore relations with Beijing and address the antagonism towards them generated by the Coalitions implication some were spies for their ancestral motherland.
The Liberals have preselected Chinese Australian businessman Scott Yung, who ironically may see his candidacy taken from him following changes to electoral boundaries. But a candidate of Chinese heritage is no sure-fire winner; Labors Jason Yat-sen Li failed to win Bennelong in 2013.
A key Labor campaigner says Chinese Australians want respect and not to be patronised. Laxale says there is still deepseated resentment of Peter Dutton in the electorate that the new boundaries have done nothing to counter.
Earlier on Monday, Duttons shadow minister for home affairs, James Paterson, was nowhere near as enthusiastic as his leader. He told the The Sydney Morning Herald: Its up to the prime minister to explain how you can have a stable relationship with an authoritarian power that is determined to threaten our infrastructure assets, interfere in our democracy and intimidate Australian citizens into silence.
Paterson, who was a founding member of the wolverines, a bipartisan group of China hawk parliamentarians, frames this trenchant criticism in the context of China being an imminent strategic threat intent on invading us. Hugh White, like Allan Behm and our own diplomats, believes this is overblown. He says the only way we will have military conflict with China in the short to medium term is if we go to war with it. This scenario presumes, as Dutton flagged when he was in government, Australia would automatically join the US in any showdown with China over Taiwan.
There is no certainty Donald Trump, should he win the US presidency in November, would be as keen as Joe Biden to go to war over Taiwan. The US in 1972, like Australia, accepted Taiwan was a Chinese province. Australias commitment to its one-China policy was reaffirmed in the joint leaders statement on Monday.
White holds to his view that any direct hostilities between China and the US would inevitably lead to nuclear conflict. You would hope this is reason enough to pursue the status quo, a position Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong restated on Sunday morning television.
Albanese and Wong have no illusions China is easy to deal with or that it can be bothered much with democratic niceties. An incident involving Australian journalist Cheng Lei at the Parliament House document-signing ceremony was proof enough of this. Cheng had been detained for almost three years in China for breaching national security and her release last October came after diplomatic representations made by Wong and Albanese.
Chinese embassy stafftried to block Cheng, who now works for Sky News, from the view of cameras at Mondays event. An Australian official intervened on her behalf. Albanese told a news conference immediately after the signing he was unaware of the kerfuffle. Don Farrell, who was metres away from Cheng, said he saw nothing untoward.
Paterson and Dutton led a pile-on accusing Albanese of being weak and not standing up for Australia. It was over the top and without any sense of proportion to the much bigger purpose of the day. With no grounds, they even accused Albanese of lying.
In a number of radio interviews the following day, Albanese said the actions of the Chinese officials were ham-fisted and clumsy. Farrell said the prime minister raised the incident directly with Premier Li.
Duttons response showed he hasnt learnt much from the 2022 election. If it applies to Chinese relations, it is even more pertinent to his nuclear-centred climate change policies.
Midweek, he named seven sites for nuclear reactors, claiming the first could come online in 11 to 13 years. All would be paid for and owned by the Australian government in a similar arrangement to Snowy 2.0. No costs were given, but if the hydro project is the template, he has a tough selling job ahead of him.
When Malcolm Turnbull announced Snowy 2.0, the scheme was to be completed in 2021 at a cost of $2 billion. That has blown out to $13 billion and the revised completion date of 2028 is now highly unlikely.
The Smart Energy Council says Dutton has unveiled a coal-keeper policy. The minister for climate change, Chris Bowen, says the plan is too slow, too expensive and too risky.
The International Energy Agency says China in the five years to 2028 will account for 56 per cent of the worlds additional renewable energy.
Nuclear now provides 4.6 per cent of Chinas energy while renewables account for 30 per cent of total generation and growing. The pandas are more plugged in than we have been led to believe. It has taken two years of hard work to undo the damage caused by the Morrison Coalition. Albanese says his government has restored high-level dialogue and engagement with China through our patient, calibrated and deliberate approach.
