Andrew Bolt: Selling Australia’s soul for Chinese vote is grotesque

Do multiculturalism and mass immigration now mean that politicians should sell out our democracy for the votes of an ethnic minority?

Australia’s freedom is not for sale. Picture: AFP

Last Saturday The Australian reported warnings about the votes of our 1.2 million Chinese Australians that were frightening – and damn our disintegrating political culture.

Those warnings weren’t subtle. The Morrison government should not criticise the Chinese dictatorship so much, because “Coalition strategists are increasingly uncertain about the effect on the substantial Chinese vote”.

SBS, our multicultural broadcaster, had days earlier reported the same threat: “Some Chinese-Australians believe the Morrison government’s strong stance on China could backfire at the next election as many marginal electorates contain large communities with Chinese heritage.”

I know Chinese Australian votes matter. They make up more than 20 per cent of the voters in no fewer than six federal electorates, four in Sydney.

But is this what multiculturalism and mass immigration now mean? That politicians should sell out our democracy for the votes of an ethnic minority? That Australia, a democracy, cannot stand up against a totalitarian regime that has crushed freedom, thrown up to a million Muslims in concentration camps and smashed us with trade bans?

The Morrison government has been warned not to criticise the Chinese dictatorship so much. Picture: Getty Images

The idea is grotesque. Did anyone warn before World War II that criticising Hitler might cost the government the German vote in South Australia?

It says something about our decay – about our new tribalism – that such suggestions are now openly discussed, but what an insult to the many Chinese who came here precisely because Australia is free.

Think of the democrats who fled Hong Kong, the students who fled China after the Tiananmen Square massacre, and all the others who fled persecution: dissidents, Christians, Falun Gong, Uighurs, Tibetans and more.

These Chinese Australians know that attacking this goosestepping dictatorship in Beijing is not the same as attacking the Chinese people, just like hating Hitler doesn’t mean you hate all Germans.

But the people now “warning” the government to back off risk making that very connection.

Listen to them. Erin Chew of the Asian Australian Alliance claims the government’s recent criticisms of China were “provocative” and lacked “racial sensitivity”.

The Asian Business Association of Whitehorse warned that Chinese Australian voters were turning off the Morrison government because the “Chinese people are more proud than before”.

Melbourne businessman Steven Zheng said our worsening relationship with China upset many voters with Chinese ancestry when “Chinese nationalism has never been stronger all around the world”.

Welcome to modern multiculturalism, where Chinese “race”, “pride” and “nationalism” apparently account for more than defending the democracy that is the very soul of Australian politics.

No wonder, when Australia’s own nationalism has been white-anted so badly that we now have Premiers too ashamed to celebrate Australia Day.

No wonder, when multiculturalism and identity politics are destroying our unity so much that even Prime Minister Scott Morrison played the race card two years ago, after I criticised one of his MPs, Gladys Liu, for her past membership of two pro-China organisations backed by China’s official propaganda arm.

Even Prime Minister Scott Morrison played the race card two years ago when MP Gladys Lius was criticised. Picture: AAP

Morrison blustered there was “a very grubby undertone” to such questioning, and a “broader smear that I think is implied in that over more than one million other Australians”: “Just because someone was born in China doesn’t make them disloyal.”

No one suggested any such thing, yet China’s official Global Times newspaper praised Morrison for his “clear reason and judgment” in claiming my questioning of Liu’s links to organisations supported by the dictatorship was indeed “casting a smear on Chinese Australians”.

We cannot let this crude identity politics shut down debate on China’s nasty record of subverting freedom, including our own.

What a record that is. China paid former Labor senator Sam Dastyari, for example, and an influential Chinese intermediary gave NSW Labor cash in an Aldi bag. ASIO last week said it stopped an attempt by a rich “puppeteer” to spend big on getting pro-Beijing people preselected for Labor at the next election.

But China’s influence isn’t just through money. Chinese students and dissidents say China’s security forces try to make them shut up here by threatening their relatives back in China

That may explain why a reporter last week found that when he tried to interview locals in the heavily-Chinese suburb of Chisholm “the vast majority of people refuse to engage in any political discussions”.

Almost all who did comment in his article in The Australian criticised our own government, not China’s – and tended to be business people needing China to stay sweet.

If these are the people now telling the government to pipe down on China, forget it.

Our freedom is not for sale. Not for either cash or votes.