Andrew Bolt: Charles Sturt University should strip John Lee of his degree

Charles Sturt University should strip Hong Kong’s security chief John Lee of his degree and make clear that we oppose everything he does and stands for.

Does Charles Sturt University like being advertised as the place that taught one of China’s worst goons everything he knows about scaring people into silence?

Surely, after last week, the university must strip John Lee of the Masters Degree in Public Policy and Administration it gave him.

Lee is Hong Kong’s security chief, and boasts often about the degree he got from Australia on how to run things.

That’s embarrassing, because Lee is one of the nastiest toadies of the Chinese dictatorship and last week had 500 police raid the pro-democracy Apple Daily newspaper, which he called a “criminal syndicate”.

Apple Daily’s owner, Jimmy Lai, had already been jailed for 20 months, his assets were frozen for promoting democracy protests and he also faces life imprisonment for allegedly colluding with foreign powers.

This time, police arrested five executives, accusing them of breaking new national security laws by asking the world to defend Hong Kong’s freedoms and impose sanctions on the authoritarian rulers of its 7.5 million people.

Police carry evidence they sized from the headquarters of the Apple Daily newspaper.

I lived in Hong Kong before the British gave it to China, and it breaks my heart to see its new rulers – particularly John Lee – now acting like cartoon Nazis to crush it.

You can tell Lee is a thug, panderer and weasel by the fact that he this year got Hong Kong police to goose-step like Nazi and Chinese troops to demonstrate their “nationalistic sentiments”, and helped give police new powers to ban democrats from running for election, saying “traitors” had to be stopped.

Yes, this guy even sounds like Goebbels.

Charles Sturt University once taught Lee how best to govern people, but I assume that whatever it said was either weak or ignored, because the United States last year imposed sanctions on Lee personally for “being involved in coercing, arresting, detaining, or imprisoning individuals” under draconian new security laws he helped create.

I’m sure none of this stuff was in the university’s textbooks on public administration, even if I’ve worried about how weak our universities have been in defending Western values and free speech.

But let’s remove any doubt and make a stand for freedom – and our reputation.

Charles Sturt University should strip John Lee of its degree and make it clear to the world that we oppose everything this ratbag does and stands for.

Freedom for Hong Kong.