James Campbell: Why we should be afraid of China’s influence
Reports of vast amounts of dodgy dollars washing through Australia make up only part of the real threat we face from China, writes James Campbell.
James Campbell
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The muted reaction from our politicians to the recent slew of stories about gangsters, brothels, Crown casino and millions and millions of dollars in iffy money which has made its way to Australia has been almost more interesting than the stories themselves.
Days after Nine media had alleged Victoria’s only casino has basically been the means by which some of the most unsavoury people in China have moved their money here, Premier Daniel Andrews seemed curiously uninterested in whether his Commission for Gambling and Liquor Regulation has been asleep at the wheel.
“They’ve got the powers that they need. And anyone who’s got any concerns around Crown or any other operator within our gaming industry should with confidence go forward either to Victoria Police if they think it’s a criminal matter or go to the VCGLR,” was his response to the allegations.
Initially the Feds didn’t seem that interested either. Asked in parliament on Monday whether any ministers had lobbied for Crown and breached the ministerial code of conduct, the Prime Minister answered: “In relation to the specific matters that were raised by the member, there has been nothing presented to me that would indicate there are any matters there for me to address”.
By Tuesday, with the allegations piling up, Attorney-General Christian Porter told the House he had reached the view that “there are sufficient concerns raised at least to warrant further investigations” and he had decided to refer the matter to the Australian Commissioner for Law Enforcement Integrity to assess whether any public servants had misbehaved.
It is tempting to shrug one’s shoulders at allegations that dodgy people with dodgy money made their way to a casino. Sure, they might have circumvented China’s laws about the export of money, but why is that is a matter of concern to us?
Should we really be getting worked up about all this?
In my opinion the answer to that is an unambiguous Yes. We should be horrified and more than a little afraid of what is coming here, because the country at the centre of this scandal is China.
China is different. Not just because it’s huge and integral to our economic future as well as being a strategic rival to the United States. It’s different because the people who rule it are conducting a great experiment, upon the outcome of which the future of the whole world hangs. Their bet — and there is nothing one can point to at the moment which would make one think it is a losing one — is that they can create a perfect and perpetual tyranny, which can deliver prosperity to its subjects, something that has never been achieved before.
The idea of a few years ago that as its economy grew it would become more liberal has been shown to be wrong. Not only is China under its communist rulers not going to liberalise its political system — ever — it has become clear that while its economy has market features, it is not a market economy, but one that is under the direction of its rulers.
It cannot be repeated enough: there is no such thing as a non-state actor in China. Your property is your property until someone decides that it isn’t. Which is why so many Chinese have been keen to get their money out of there almost as soon as they have made it.
A Victorian politician told me recently that he had once asked a group of Chinese businessmen why they had paid so much over the odds for land in Melbourne that could never turn a profit.
They told him: “You don’t understand: $40 million in Australia is worth more than $60m in China”.
The trouble with this is that there is no such thing as a free lunch. What we failed to understand when we decided to allow our country to become a sunny place for shady people, as the French Riviera was once described, is that the deal between China under President Xi Jinping and the underworld it has exported to our shores is that they will continue to do the mother country’s bidding while they’re here.
These immensely rich people — the sons and daughters of China’s “rancid elite” as one state government minister has described them to me — have taken over basically every corner of the Chinese community in this country. They’ve splashed a lot of cash around in our political parties too.
And according to spook-familiar sources of my acquaintance, they’ve paid for a lot of China’s spying activity here too.
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The sums of money are immense. On Wednesday the Wall Street Journal reported that Xi Jinping’s first cousin, who lives in Toorak, gambled $39 million at Crown over an 18-month period in 2012 and 2013. That’s a lot of sugar.
Next time you are in the city and admiring all the new buildings that have been built in the past 10 years, ask yourself where the money came from. And who actually owns them.
Are the “Singaporean” and “Malaysian” investors one often reads about really from those countries or are they fronts for money streaming out of China?
Until now you could argue that we have been incredibly naive about the arrival of this money on our shores. You can’t say that now. We have been warned.
James Campbell is national politics editor