Andrew Bolt: How Labor deputy leader Richard Marles is toeing China’s red line

The Chinese embassy would have given Richard Marles an elephant stamp for being such a patsy in his full-throated rah rah Beijing speech.

Labor’s deputy leader, Richard Marles, said this last week in defending his decision to let China’s embassy vet a speech he gave in Beijing in 2019.

“There were no changes whatsoever made to a speech that I made in China,” he said.

But, Richard, why would China’s communist dictatorship want to change a word?

It would have loved your speech! The embassy staff would have given you an elephant stamp for being such a patsy – a “useful idiot”, in the words of communist giant Vladimir Lenin.

Why would China object to a speech suggesting excuses for crushing democracy in Hong Kong and putting Uighurs into concentration camps? In which you also said Australia should have closer “defence co-operation” with China and not resist China’s expansion in the Pacific?

No, it’s not a defence of Marles to say China didn’t change one word of Marles’ speech at the Foreign Studies University in Beijing.

It’s an accusation.

Labor deputy leader Richard Marles has defended a speech he gave in Beijing. Picture: Tim Hunter

And I’ll ask again: is Richard Marles truly qualified to become our next Defence Minister if Labor wins next month’s election?

Look closely at what he did say in China to see if it was as brave as Labor’s foreign affairs spokesman, Penny Wong, last week implied: “Richard gave a speech in China in which he criticised the behaviour of the Communist Party in relation to Hong Kong and the Uighurs.”

Put like that, it sounds like a great speech from a man we’re told is one of Labor’s defence hawks.

In fact, it was a full-throated rah rah of China and its “human rights”.

“Any discussion of this issue (of human rights) must begin with the acknowledgment and recognition that no other country in civilisation has lifted more people out of poverty, more quickly, than modern China,” insisted Marles.

That’s just crawling. In fact, Chairman Mao’s mad policies starved more than 40 million Chinese to death in the Great Leap Forward, and crippled China’s growth for the first 30 years of communist rule.

Marles also seemed to back China’s claim that the most important human right is getting richer (and freedom can wait). As China officially puts it: “It suits China’s conditions … to give priority to the people’s right to existence and development.”

Hong Kong pro-democracy supporters scuffle with riot police in 2020. Picture: Anthony Kwan

But on Marles went, echoing China’s arguments, ignoring its menace: “We … deeply value our relationship with China. We must seek to build it. And not just in economic terms, but also through exploring political co-operation and even defence co-operation.”

Pardon? More “defence co-operation” with a dictatorial regimen that threatens war?

But Marles wouldn’t tolerate such talk: “To define China as an enemy is a profound mistake. To talk of a new Cold War is silly and ignorant.”

How blind. China is indeed an enemy of democracies, and anyone with eyes could see this “new Cold War”.

But again, Marles was just parroting the propaganda of dictator Xi Jinping, who also says “we need to discard Cold War mentality”, meaning countries should not form alliances with the US and resist the expansion of Chinese power.

What a coincidence! That’s what Marles argued, too.

The growing role of China in the Pacific was a “good thing”, he said: “Australia does not have an exclusive right to engage with the Pacific” and shouldn’t “engage in the strategic denial of others”.

Richard Marles failed to condemn China’s human rights abuses. Picture: Isaac Lawrence

But wait. Where’s Marles’ brave attack on China’s human rights abuses?

Let me see … Ah! Here it is. Easy to miss.

“When necessary we will raise our concerns, as we have about the minority Uighur population in Xinjiang, or the situation in Hong Kong,” Marles told those Beijing students.

“People have a right to express their views through peaceful and lawful ­assembly.”

But what Marles did was worse than merely hint in a couple of brief paragraphs at just two of the Chinese dictatorship’s grotesque human rights atrocities: destroying democracy in Hong Kong and jailing and “re-educating” up to a million Muslim Uighurs.

Worse, in the very next breath he offered the dictatorship’s own excuses: “At the same time, violence can never be condoned even in the form of protest.”

Straight out of dictator Xi’s mouth. He himself said China had to crush the Hong Kong democracy movement because its “radical and violent crimes” had “seriously trampled on the rule of law and social order”.

And his official propaganda arms say Xinjiang needed these “counter-terrorism and deradicalisation measures” to stop “thousands of terrorist attacks”.

So what in Richard Marles’ China speech could the dictatorship object to? A comfort to Beijing; an indictment of Labor.