Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews planning imminent China trade trip

Premier Daniel Andrews is planning an imminent trade mission to China.

The visit would make him the first Australian politician to visit the country since the signing of the AUKUS defence agreement.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews is planning multiple overseas trips this year.Credit: Jason South

Although the state government has kept DFAT informed of its plans, the trip – which could occur within days – will cause some unease in Canberra considering the history of Victoria’s previous Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) agreements with China, which the former Coalition government cancelled.

Asked about the upcoming trip, a spokeswoman for the Victorian government said: “Since coming to government we’ve strengthened our ties with Victoria’s largest trading partner.

“We don’t always agree on everything, but we have a genuine relationship built upon strong social, cultural and economic bonds.

“Official international visits by members of the Andrews Labor government strengthen our state’s global ties and create lasting benefits for all Victorians.”

Foreign Minister Penny Wong travelled to Beijing to meet her Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in December. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is yet to do but has not ruled out a visit. He met Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Bali in November.

Belt and Road is a $1.5 trillion global infrastructure initiative made up of railways, ports, roads, pipelines, power stations and industrial parks, co-funded and mostly built by China.

DFAT was blindsided when the Andrews government announced the second part of the Belt and Road agreement on October 23, 2019, which signed Victoria up to the initiative.

That led the Morrison government to enact new laws which required the foreign minister to cancel agreements that states entered into with an overseas government if they contradicted Australia’s national interest.

Victoria’s Belt and Road agreement was subsequently quashed under the foreign veto laws.

Unveiled about a decade ago, BRI was likened by some, including China, to the Marshall Plan – the US program for rebuilding Europe after World War II. But its financial scope and geographic ambition were much bigger and it was seen as a key component of China’s own economic development.

As Chinese President Xi Jinping’s signature foreign policy, it was pitched as an economic stimulus program across Asia and the Indo-Pacific.​ And while BRI has been incredibly influential, it has also been criticised for creating bungled projects and debt traps.

With fanfare, the Victorian government signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Chinese government in October 2018 and a “framework” agreement a year later.

While DFAT was consulted on the first agreement, it never saw the second deal until it was announced in the media. The agreements allowed Chinese investment in the state and for Victorian companies to participate in Chinese government projects overseas under the BRI banner. Neither deal was ever approved by Andrews’ cabinet.

During this period, Beijing came under increasing international scrutiny over its militarisation of the South China Sea, the democratic crackdown in Hong Kong, the detention of more than 1 million Uyghurs in Xinjiang’s forced labour camps and its economic coercion against countries that stood up to it, including Australia.

As criticism of the Victorian government’s approach to China escalated, the Morrison government passed new foreign agreement veto laws. In 2021, the federal government cancelled the two Victorian deals because it argued they contradicted Australia’s national interest.

Andrews wasn’t ignorant of the issues. In 2020, fending off criticism about a Chinese company building a fleet of trains for Victoria being linked to China’s mass internment of Uyghurs, Andrews said he did not “agree with everything that is done in every country”.

The Victorian premier always defended the BRI deals on the basis that they would create more jobs and economic opportunities for his state.

There has been a thaw in relations between Canberra and Beijing following the election of the Albanese government, though there are fresh points of tensions over TikTok, Chinese-made security cameras and the fallout from the AUKUS security pact.

Albanese, US President Joe Biden and UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced the AUKUS agreement this month. The security pact, aimed at countering China’s rise in the Indo-Pacific region, will lead to Australia regularly hosting American nuclear-powered submarines within the next five years and provide the federal government with a new fleet of submarines at a cost of up to $368 billion.

China has angrily responded to AUKUS by accusing the countries involved of going “further down the wrong and dangerous path for their own geopolitical self-interest.”

Asked whether the federal government had any concerns about Andrews’ upcoming trip, the prime minister’s office didn’t address the question.

On his own plans to visit China, the prime minister’s office referred to comments this month saying he would accept an invitation from Beijing.

“If there’s an invite, then I would accept that,” Albanese said on March 7.

“I think it’s been a good thing that the relationship has got more stable. We want a more stable, secure region. And I’ve said we will cooperate with China where we can, we’ll disagree where we must, but we’ll engage in our national interest.”

It is not yet known which Chinese cities Andrews hopes to visit, or what announcements will be made while there.

However, the Victorian government does have offices in Shanghai, Beijing, Nanjing and Chengdu. Victoria also has a sister-state relationship with Jiangsu Province, a coastal region north of Shanghai, and Melbourne has been a sister city of Tianjin since 1980.

China is a significant source of income for Australia’s higher education sector, with about 20,000 Chinese international students study at Victorian universities.

The premier’s previous visits to China

• October 2019
• April 2019
• May 2018
• May 2017
• September 2016
• September 2015

Andrews last went to the China in October 2019, his second visit that year. He also visited China at least once as opposition leader and made all of his ministers visit at least once.

The Chinese links of some of his staffers have also some under scrutiny over the years.

​In 2018, Andrews’s adviser Marty Mei was named a “special consultant” to the Shenzhen Association of Australia, part of a network of groups run by the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department.

His electorate officer, Nancy Yang, once undertook a Communist Party propaganda training course and in 2020 posted a series of articles and videos on social media suggesting COVID was created by the United States and transported to China by the US Army. Andrews repeatedly defended both of his staffers.

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