Peta Credlin: Labor Party needs to back Australia on China

In a battle with China for Australia’s sovereignty and self-respect, the last thing we need is the Labor Party backing Beijing over Canberra.

It’s pretty unfair to blame the Morrison government for a “complete breakdown” in relations with China unless you think that Beijing’s complaints against us are justified.

But Anthony Albanese wasn’t the only Labor leader who looked ambivalent about Australia last week.

As well as the federal Opposition Leader, the Victorian Premier Dan Andrews, in a fight between the Chinese government and our own, wasn’t sure whose side he was on.

Just six years ago — when the Abbott government finalised China’s first trade deal with a major economy and when President Xi told a state dinner in the Great Hall of our parliament that China would be “democratic” by mid-century — it was easy to be optimistic and to see communist China and the liberal democratic West on converging paths.

But not anymore. Last week’s propaganda image from a senior Chinese official, of an Australian soldier slitting the throat of an Afghan child, was a low blow even by Beijing’s standards; and showed the communist regime’s determination to make an example of Australia for refusing to kowtow to it.

Beijing's foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian posted a fake image of an Australian soldier slitting the throat of an Afghani child.

We are going to have to accept the fact that our days of getting rich on the back of China’s development are gone.

Ever higher resource exports based on insatiable Chinese demand; floods of Chinese students and tourists transforming universities into corporations and many businesses into successes; and the promise of ever more rivers of gold as the hundreds of millions of Chinese still out of the middle-class come into it; forget it. The gold rush is over.

China is punishing us because we insist on speaking truth to power.

China will continue to turn our trade on and off like a tap. The recent boycotts of barley, coal and now wine on spurious environmental and anti-dumping grounds will get worse, not better. As will the rhetorical assaults from so-called wolf-warrior officials.

China’s embassy-supplied list of 14 complaints include: that we have blocked some Chinese takeover bids for Australian companies; that we banned Huawei from the 5G network; that we made people working for foreign governments register; that we speak out against human rights abuses in China, and the illegal creation of military bases out of coral reefs in the South China Sea; and that we want a full independent investigation of the Wuhan virus.

What it shows is Beijing’s intolerance of any country that’s not totally subservient.

It’s not Australia’s fault the Chinese government is unhappy. It’s the nature of the communist regime, compounded by traditional Chinese government conceit about being the world’s “Middle Kingdom”.

Political commentator Peta Credlin. Picture: John Feder

Yet after one day of bipartisanship with the government against Beijing’s latest smear, it was back to politics as usual for Labor, with the Coalition – and not the foreign communists – as the real enemy.

It’s bizarre that a party that prides itself on concern for human rights should be in Beijing’s camp even for a moment given the imprisonment of more than a million Uighurs in “re-education” camps, the abrogation of civil and legal rights in Hong Kong, and the threats of invasion against the 25 million people of liberal democratic Taiwan.

When asked about Beijing’s smear against our soldiers, the Victorian Labor minister who’d negotiated the state’s Belt and Road debt deal declined to comment.

Premier Andrews excused him, saying that Danny Pearson, now the Minister for Creative Industries, had “no responsibilities for those matters”, and that expecting him to show solidarity with the Australian military was, quote, “trivial” and a “waste of time”.

Given that our defence personnel have spent many months mopping up Labor’s hotel quarantine mess, the least our soldiers deserved was unqualified support from the Victorian Premier and his band of hapless ministers.

Under our constitution, foreign affairs is entirely the responsibility of the national government — but that hasn’t stopped Daniel Andrews signing onto China’s debt-trap diplomacy, in the hope of getting cheap Chinese money to bankroll the state following the recent budget red ink, and the now likely loss of Victoria’s Triple-A credit rating.

Both Andrews and Albanese should know that the only way to avoid being savaged by the Chinese government is to avoid ever doing anything that it doesn’t like — which is a supine and servile position that no self-respecting Australian government could ever adopt.

In a battle for Australia’s sovereignty and self-respect, the last thing we need are premiers backing Beijing over Canberra.

Watch Peta Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm

THUMBS UP

Retired Special Forces Major Heston Russell for mobilising over 50,000 Australians to support his former colleagues retaining their Meritorious Unit Citation and forcing a monumental backdown from Defence Chiefs and the Morrison Government. You don’t punish the many over the allegations directed at a few.

THUMBS DOWN

NSW Energy Minister Matt Kean’s $10 million taxpayer handout to a Beijing-backed wind farm. I don’t know what’s worse - largesse to China or more subsidies to make our power more unreliable and expensive!

Originally published as Peta Credlin: Labor Party needs to back Australia on China