Australia did not come to its U-turn on relations with China in 2017-20 by the traditional path, as the first article in this series explained on Monday. Our new approach did not define some new relationship to pursue with China or any new strategy – other than bureaucratic shorthand phrases that became transformed into slogans: “push back”, “call out” and “out in front”.

This U-turn came in response to our intelligence community identifying alarming Chinese objectives: they were aiming to corrupt and capture our politicians and political system and damage our defence relationship with the US, hack secret private and public databases and displace the US in east Asia.