James Campbell: Finally China’s cheer squad is facing scrutiny
CHINA’s steadily increasing influence in Australia is finally drawing the attention it deserves, writes James Campbell.
James Campbell
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THESE are troubling times for China’s Australian cheer squad. For more than a decade the Communist superpower’s influence on Australian politics had been quietly growing without anyone making much fuss about it.
All that changed this year when the Labor Party and a number of brave Coalition backbenchers surprised everyone by forcing the Turnbull Government to abandon its attempt to ratify an extradition treaty with Beijing that had lain dormant since it was signed in the dying days of the Howard government.
SHADOWY ‘FRONT’ FOR CHINESE GOVERNMENT GIVES ALMOST $6M TO LABOR, LIBERAL PARTIES
That event coincided with the Australian media starting to report on the flow of People’s Republic of China-connected money to our politicians, a story that had been sitting in plain view for years but that for some reason we had largely chosen to ignore.
Bob Carr, who older readers will recall as one of Julia Gillard’s magnificent captain’s picks — in this case as foreign affairs minister — is now director of the Australia-China Relations Institute at the University of Technology Sydney, a perch from which he can regularly be heard spruiking a pro-Beijing line. Last Friday, he had a piece in the South China Morning Post — headlined, “Why is Australia talking tough about major trade partner China?” — in which he went so far as to claim Australia had declared “rhetorical war” on China. He was particularly upset by a speech Julie Bishop gave in Singapore this year in which she argued that China needs to become a democracy if it is to reach its economic potential.
Sounding like the spokesman for the Chinese Government that he effectively is, Carr squawked the country’s “6.9 per cent growth and seamless transition to a services economy contradicts the thesis”, while lamenting “Australian leaders up until now have generally refrained from lecturing China’s Communist leaders about the merits of democracy”.
Carr was also unimpressed by this year’s slew of stories about Beijing’s activities in Australia, stories he tried to dismiss as an “anti-China panic”, claiming “the only example of Chinese espionage was a single Australian public servant who might have kept official papers in his home and had a Chinese wife”.
That is rubbish, as Carr well knows, since it has been known publicly since 2011 that the Chinese Government had gained access to the Australian parliament’s computer servers and, since 2014, had the run of the system for at least a year, during which time it had almost certainly copied everything on it.
Even more absurd was Carr’s attempt to ridicule the growing influence of Chinese money on Australian politics, claiming “despite headlines about Chinese cash buying influence in Australian politics, only two donations were uncovered and one was from a businessman who had been an Australian citizen for 20 years ... Two donations — and with 300 Chinese companies in the Chinese Chamber of Commerce”.
That is absolute bollocks. Last month the Herald Sun reported that members of the Australian Council for the Promotion of the Peaceful Reunification of China, which Labor MP Michael Danby has described as a “as a business front” for the Communist Party, have in recent years donated $6 million to the Liberal and Labor parties. The bulk of the donations went to one branch of the Labor Party: in Carr’s state of NSW. In fact, in 2012-13, a quarter of that branch’s total donations came from members of the Council.
TO the surprise of those of us who thought the NSW Labor Party had a well-earned reputation for venality, it turns out they are surprisingly loyal. On Tuesday The Australian reported that its state leader, Luke Foley, recently held a press conference for Chinese media at state parliament in Sydney at which he had stuck rigidly to Beijing’s line on its One Belt One Road infrastructure plan. This was a few months after returning from China. Foley was, unsurprisingly, also on the same page as Carr when it came to recent journalism about Beijing’s influence in Australia.
“I’m very concerned a series of reports on the Australian media seem to be suggesting we turn our backs on friendship with China,” Foley said, adding he thought the reporting reflected “a Cold War mentality”. As The Oz pointed out, the “Cold War mentality” was lifted directly from a statement this year by China’s ambassador to Australia. You couldn’t get a better illustration of what 2017 kowtowing looks like or why something needs to be done about how we fund our political parties.
The irony of ironies is that many of the Chinese media organisations present at the conference will be wholly or in part owned by the Chinese Government and under its direction — as we have learned from recent reporting that Foley thinks reflects Cold War thinking.
Make no mistake, this country is well on the way to becoming Finland.
James Campbell is national politics editor
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