Andrew Bolt: Morrison’s crucial mistake in China stoush

He was right to be furious, but the Prime Minister was taking a leaf from China’s book in condemning a doctored image, writes Andrew Bolt.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Picture: Gary Ramage/NCA NewsWire.

Scott Morrison blew it. His reaction to China posting a doctored image of an Australian soldier cutting the throat of an Afghan child was too … Chinese.

The Prime Minister was right to be furious last week, of course.

But Morrison was wrong — too Chinese — by saying something untrue: that this sick graphic “cannot be justified on any basis whatsoever”.

I wish that were so. But China simply exploited a rumour in an Australian Defence Force report.

As our own ABC reported, a 2016 ADF inquiry, by Samantha Crompvoets, reported claims that “SAS soldiers slit the throats of two 14-year-old boys they thought might be Taliban sympathisers”.

It is this claim — not tested in court — that China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman last week cited in defending its throat-cutting graphic.

“Two 14-year-old boys were killed with their throats slit and their bodies were bagged and thrown into a nearby river,” she said, flinging right back at us the words from our own defence force and ABC reports.

In fact, Morrison made a second mistake — also too Chinese, as in communist Chinese.

He called for censorship. He didn’t just demand China apologise and remove the tweet “immediately”, but asked Twitter to take it down, too.

But don’t we defend free speech? Yet we’re now demanding Twitter ban posts that our government doesn’t like? Bet China would just love that precedent.

Thank heavens Twitter refused. And China just sniggered and gloated.

No, Morrison stuffed his response.

What he should have said was this: a country is not defined by the crimes of a few, but the response of the many.

Yes, a very small number of Australian soldiers allegedly committed war crimes in Afghanistan. Allegedly.

But those alleged crimes were not sanctioned by our government and army leaders, and are rejected by the nation.

They have been officially investigated, officially condemned and the only reason China can attack us is because we ourselves told the world what we — allegedly — did.

That is the difference between us and China.

China has as a matter of state policy imprisoned a million Muslims, as well as human rights activists, Christians, writers and democracy campaigners.

It has executed supposed enemies of the state, and infamously murdered hundreds – if not thousands – of student protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

It brutally invaded Tibet and has now crushed freedom in Hong Kong. It is credibly accused of widespread organ harvesting among prisoners.

It arrests foreigners as hostages. It tortures prisoners, including even a British consulate official.

The difference between China and Australia is that China commits all these crimes at the express order of its government and then covers up.

Yet China has now exploited our willingness to expose our own failings. These hypocrites — these tyrants — are in fact punishing us for a virtue, as much as for a vice.

But there is one more important thing to say about China exploiting our war crimes report.

This is yet another act of war. China is using propaganda, trade bans, espionage and cyber attacks to attack Australia because it wants us smashed, as a warning to any other country that might defy it.

It wants Australia smashed not for war crimes but an even worse crime in the eyes of this dictatorship: for standing up for freedom.

The Foreign Ministry spokesman who posted the doctored image is a thug called Zhao Lijian, who last month listed Australia’s supposed sins — the errors we must correct for China to end its war on us.

These are his main complaints: we’d protested against China jailing a million Muslims; we’d opposed China stripping freedom from Hong Kong; we’d stopped China’s Huawei company from building our new 5G network, so it couldn’t use it to spy on us.

Finally, we’d asked for an “independent international inquiry” into how this disastrous coronavirus started. In China.

Look at those complaints. Our sin is that we stood up for freedom, for democracy and for human rights, as well as for our own security.

That is why Zhao now paints Australia as a war criminal. He wants to blur that moral difference.

Yet the rod we’ve given him to beat us proves we take these values seriously. We judge ourselves, just as we judge China. We are not hypocrites.

But China is. It now judges us by standards it wouldn’t even try to live up to. Morrison should have said that.

For us, human rights is a value. But for China, it’s our weakness and its weapon.