Miranda Devine: Morrison signals that Australia won’t be kicked around

The new Quad partnership of Australia, the US, India and Japan is a bulwark for this country against China’s bullying tactics, writes Miranda Devine.

Scott Morrison looked confident and purposeful as he buzzed around Washington, DC, last week, shoring up Australia’s relationships with America and other powerful allies to stave off China’s aggression.

It has taken 18 months, but Australia, the US, India, Japan, the UK, and other “like-minded” pandemic-scarred nations have united against China, although they deny the charge that they are pursuing a second Cold War.

Scott Morrison arrived back into Canberra on Sunday evening. Picture: Newswire/Gary Ramage

Morrison will never say out loud that countering China is the purpose of the new AUKUS alliance, which will provide Australia with nuclear-powered submarines to operate undetected in the Indo-Pacific.

He denies that the reinvigorated Quad alliance with the US, India and Japan is an anti-China group.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison - here with President Joe Biden - has been busy in the US this week. Picture: AFP

He says only that it is a positive force for good to ensure an Indo-Pacific “free of coercion”.

But Biden administration officials see China’s bullying of Australia as a proxy for undermining the US, and Morrison did admit to US media at the end of his trip that the relationship with Beijing had been strained.

“We’ve experienced some difficulties in the relationship, which China have set out,” he told CBS Sunday. “(But) we will always stand up for our values and the way we run a liberal democratic country.”

Morrison’s creation of AUKUS, and his enthusiastic embrace of the Quad, sends a strong message to China that it can’t kick Australia around anymore.