Andrew Bolt: Kowtowing to China means our values are dead and gone

The real reason we’re being urged to shut up and crawl to China is that profit seems to come before principles, because freedom isn’t worth the fight.

Listening to the latest three apologists urging us to kowtow to China makes me feel I need a shower.

Yes, there’s a good argument — if not respectable — for us to shut up and crawl to China.

But please just say it straight: this dictatorship is too vicious and strong to cross, and there’s too much money to make in trading with it.

That we must put profit before principles, because freedom isn’t worth the fight.

Say, that, gentlemen, and I’ll at least give you credit for being frank.

But the left’s Nicholas Whitlam, Gareth Evans and David Brophy on Wednesday just made me feel I’d been buried under horse manure.

Take Whitlam, a former investment banker and son of Gough, the famed Labor prime minister.

Writing in The Australian, Whitlam pooh-poohed warnings we were fools to sell the lease of the Darwin port to a Chinese company closely linked to China’s aggressive dictatorship, which is now openly threatening to capture democratic Taiwan.

No big deal, said Whitlam. The port’s lease covered only the wharf’s commercial areas, and Chinese spies could just as easily monitor naval movements from the nearby fish and chip shop.

Apparently, it’s none of our business that China is scrapping democracy in Hong Kong or jailing up to a million Muslim Chinese. Picture: AFP

Seriously? Access to the infrastructure, communications, plans and people of that port would be of no advantage to China?

That’s bad enough, but Whitlam really went rogue in insisting China’s savagery was none of our business.

Sure, China had created military bases throughout the South China Sea — 27, in fact, as part of its illegal theft of that territory — but Whitlam said that “has nothing to do with Australia”.

Excuse me? That sea to our north includes some of our most vital shipping lanes, which China could now shut more easily. None of our business?

Nor, apparently, is it our business China is scrapping democracy in Hong Kong or jailing up to a million Muslim Chinese.

“They are not Chinese aggression; they are internal matters,” declared Whitlam.

China’s dictator couldn’t have said it better. Jailing democracy activists and committing cultural genocide are just “internal matters” and democracies should shut up.

Shame on Whitlam. Was Hitler’s genocide of the Jews also an “internal matter”?

The left once believed in universal human rights such as freedom. It once argued — correctly — a loss of freedom somewhere was a loss of freedom everywhere: that no man was an island and “therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee”.

What changed?

To be fair, Gareth Evans (above), the former Labor foreign affairs minister, at least admits we should “push back” against what he politely calls China’s “overreach” in stealing the South China Sea, destroying Hong Kong’s democracy and imprisoning Muslim Uighurs.

But he, too, overreaches in his Asialink podcast when he tells Australians to “modify” and be “careful about your language” when talking about China, to avoid offending a dictatorship he admits is “neurotic and a little over reactive”.

Let’s ignore that China has taken the South China Sea. Picture: Bloomberg

Having told us to curb our free speech to suit China, Evans has the hide to then claim it is “completely overstated” to say China is “hellbent on some kind of global domination”.

So ignore it’s actually invaded Tibet, gone to war with Vietnam, killed Indian troops this year over a disputed border, taken the South China Sea, claimed Japanese islands and threatened to invade Taiwan. Just trust Evans, who says China simply wants to “be far more of a rule-maker than a rule-taker”.

But isn’t that exactly the problem? That this dictatorship wants to set the rules for the rest of us? Which, as Evans himself urges, includes limiting our free speech.

That’s the “global domination” I really fear. Not Chinese commandos sailing into Sydney Harbour, but China bullying us into shutting our mouths, with people like Evans saying it’s for our own good.

Lastly, there’s the babbling in The Age newspaper by David Brophy, a Sydney University academic who seems to think the US — not China — is the real hostile power.

“America’s military presence in Asia serves American interests alone,” he writes, overlooking how desperately Taiwan, Japan, Australia and India want America to help protect us from China.

Adds Brophy: if Australia joined a war to defend democratic Taiwan from a Chinese invasion, it would be for the “ same motivations” that had us fighting past “immoral wars” — to “prove Australia’s relevance and worth as a US ally”.

How about that? Not a word about actually defending freedom from a great tyranny.

Are such values so dead and forgotten?