The Liberals had a plan to court Chinese Australians. Then they blew it up

The Coalition spent three years trying to regain the trust of Chinese-Australian voters in crucial seats in Sydney and Melbourne. But everything fell apart in a matter of minutes.

Speaking on Channel Seven’s Sunrise program on the Wednesday before the election, Senator Jane Hume warned of “Chinese spies” handing out how-to-vote cards. Her comments were triggered by reports in this masthead that an association allegedly linked to the Chinese Communist Party had organised campaigners for a teal MP and a Labor MP, before the latter rejected the arrangement.

Jane Hume’s comments about “Chinese spies” eroded the trust of the Chinese migrant community towards the Liberal Party.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

Hume’s team insists her comments are only related to the Hubei Association, and in a statement Hume told this masthead the Electoral Integrity Assurance Taskforce was still investigating the issue.

But the damage was done, say Liberal insiders, who now believe the fallout from the senator’s comments, and Labor’s move to capitalise on them, were instrumental in the Coalition losing support from voters in the Chinese diaspora.

Labor senator Penny Wong responds to Hume’s remarks in a video aimed at Chinese Australians.Credit: Rednote

The battle to win over this community, a campaign within a campaign, ultimately collapsed and became emblematic of the broader failures within the Coalition election pitch.

This masthead spoke to 10 Liberal and Labor sources, who had differing opinions on the effectiveness of the Liberal Party’s three-year strategy to reconnect with the 1.4 million members of the Chinese-Australian community.

But they all agreed the strategy fell apart as clips of the Sunrise interview were shared to WeChat, the Chinese social media app, and Labor senator Penny Wong posted her own video attacking Hume’s comments. One Labor MP said Wong’s video immediately began popping up in conversations with Chinese Australians in Melbourne.

The video was seen 500,000 times in 24 hours in the last week of the campaign.

“We’ve seen this before from the Liberal Party. Why is it that the Liberal Party continues to question the loyalty of Chinese Australians?” Wong said in the video.

“We all remember how Peter Dutton weaponised the relationship with China. He didn’t care about the consequences for us, for our communities.

Peter Dutton and Scott Morrison in 2023. Sources say the Liberal Party has been unable to shake the perception it is anti-China.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

“Now he wants your vote, he says something different. But Chinese Australians know what Peter Dutton is like.

“While mountains and rivers can be changed, one’s nature is difficult to alter.”

This proverb, spoken in Mandarin, is now haunting the Liberals as they seek to alter their nature into a party that can again win elections.

Key to this is reconciling how a community that is crucial to the Coalition’s electoral chances has swung against it in several crucial seats in the past two federal elections.

The Liberals’ Keith Wolahan lost his seat of Menzies, in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

In her statement responding to Wong’s criticism, Hume pointed to the taskforce’s investigation and said: “It is deeply concerning that the minister for foreign affairs would politicise an issue as important as possible foreign interference in our election.”

The irony of the situation is not lost on Liberal Party members. Following the defeat of the Morrison government, it was Hume who co-wrote the party’s 2022 election review that called for careful language as Liberals sought to rebuild their relationship with the Chinese community.

“There is a particular need for the party’s representatives to be sensitive to the genuine concerns of the Chinese community and to ensure language used cannot be misinterpreted as insensitive,” the review says.

Liberal sources said the party spent three years working to achieve this goal, hiring Chinese-speaking staff and building the infrastructure to sell the party’s message to these communities.

They hoped to appeal to Chinese-Australian voters by talking up the Coalition’s economic credentials and stance on crime.

Liberal candidates such as Katie Allen and Keith Wolahan, running in the respective seats of Chisholm and Menzies in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, appeared in WeChat videos with Chinese language captions and speech.

Wong was the face of Labor’s pitch to these voters and appeared in WeChat clips introducing ALP candidates in seats with significant populations of Chinese Australians, including Deakin, Chisholm, Aston and Menzies. In these videos, she spoke about her Malaysian-Chinese ancestry.

Labor also mailed out Chinese language flyers from Wong and tailored specific phone banks and community doorknocking campaigns to seats with large populations of Chinese speakers.

Unknown to most of the voting public, a mini-campaign was playing out in the suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney in April and the first few days of May.

But, one Liberal source said, the Coalition’s battle fell apart at the final charge.

“It wasn’t the only problem, but after that video from Penny Wong was seen 500,000 times, that was the number one most damaging issue for us,” they said.

Other sources have pointed to comments by Dutton, who named China as the biggest threat to national security during the Channel Seven leaders’ debate, as another example of the rhetoric that was turned against the Liberals.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at a Chinese language school in the seat of Chisholm during the election campaign.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

There was a belief internally that Dutton had failed to rebrand himself, and the Liberal Party’s image had not recovered from Scott Morrison’s prime ministership, when there was a perception the Liberal Party was anti-China.

In the last two weeks of this year’s election campaign, as Labor began to believe it could win Menzies and Deakin, Dutton and Morrison’s faces were plastered at the top of full-page advertisements in WeChat groups.

“A vote for the Liberal Party candidate is a vote for Peter Dutton. Don’t let Australia-China relations regress to the Morrison era,” the ads said in Chinese language.

Former Liberal MP Christopher Pyne, a government minister under Morrison, told the ABC on Thursday night that Australia’s Chinese community had been targeted by the Liberals during the campaign but ended up feeling left out.

‘There’s a way of saying things that people will agree with and there’s a way of saying things that make people feel like we’re not for you.’

Former Liberal MP Christopher Pyne

“While we weren’t racist about Chinese people, certainly, we cast a suspicion, or they felt that we were casting suspicion, over Chinese people because of our comments about mainland China, the People’s Republic of China,” he said.

“There’s a way of saying things that people will agree with and there’s a way of saying things that make people feel like we’re not for you.”

The final results indicate that in this election, Chinese Australians did not feel aligned to the Liberal brand.

In four Melbourne seats with significant Chinese-Australian populations, Labor snatched heartland Liberal seats Deakin and Menzies, retained marginal Chisholm and improved its margin in Aston, a seat even the ALP had largely expected to lose.

Dutton and Liberal candidate Katie Allen campaigning in the seat of Chisholm on April 30.Credit: James Brickwood

Recriminations among Victorian Liberals started early in the count when results pointed towards a “disaster”, a source said.

The Liberal Party had stopped representing modern Australia, moderate Victorian state sources said.

“It’s not really a broad church any more,” one said.

The sources felt the party offered the biggest voter bloc – young people – nothing. And it was distracted by culture wars while beating up on migrants, Chinese people and Indigenous communities. As one party figure framed it: why would any of those people vote for us?

Elections are a popularity contest, another said, and Australia is majority multicultural and majority women. The party had to make up ground among professional women and young voters.

“We were talking to the wrong voters,” they said.

In Sydney, notable swings to Labor were recorded in seats such as Bennelong and Reid. The battle for Bradfield remains on a knife edge.

Last week, the Chinese Community Council of Australia’s Victorian chapter put out a statement requesting an apology for Hume’s remarks, and said the comments concerned thousands of Chinese Australians.

Jimmy Li, the president of the Victorian chapter, said political parties should engage with the community genuinely and consistently.

He said Labor did a better job this electoral cycle, and efforts by the Coalition to organise community events in the months before the election came too late.

“The language they use is very important … These kinds of comments will stoke fear and division that’s really unhelpful,” Li said.

“Fundamentally, any political party should value inclusion, not othering. Over the long term the Chinese community have been made to feel they are not part of Australian society. So politicians should see Chinese Australians as not ‘them’ but ‘us’.”

As Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan seeks to capitalise on Labor’s federal success, she announced on Friday that her next trade mission would be to China and referenced the Coalition’s woes.

“Over the last few years, we’ve heard unnecessary and divisive rhetoric from conservative politicians that have been hurtful to Chinese-Australian families,” Allan said.

“In an era of divisive, Trump-style rhetoric here and abroad, I want to make the case that Victorians from overseas are a proud part of our story to the world.”

It wasn’t just the Chinese diaspora that Liberal campaigners believe the Coalition pushed away during the election campaign.

Two sources said Indian Australians, many of whom live in growing suburbs in Melbourne and Sydney, were repeatedly sounding the alarm about the Coalition’s immigration and international student policies and how they affected family members.

“The immigration plan was so stupid,” one Liberal source said.

“We had an outer-suburban strategy, but we ignored the [migrant] communities who actually live in those suburbs.”

Attack ads claiming the Coalition would cut pensions for visa holders who left the country for more than four weeks were also shared thousands of times across WhatsApp and other social media.

“Everyone talks about the Jane Hume video, but those advertisements were killing us in seats in Melbourne’s north and west,” the source said.

They said the pension claims were misinformation, but it didn’t matter because the Coalition’s rhetoric on immigration made the claims sound like a Coalition plan.

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