Picture bigger than Albanese’s visit: Xi Jinping sees Australia as fruit ripe for plucking

It’s safe to say Anthony Albanese’s trip to China is a big deal for the prime minister, with his walk along the Great Wall placing the Labor leader alongside party icon Gough Whitlam and former US president Richard Nixon in the history books.

But behind the carefully stage-managed moments, pressure from the United States and talk of the Darwin Port is another truth: Albanese’s trip to China is also a big deal for President Xi Jinping. Speaking with host Samantha Selinger-Morris on The Morning Edition podcast, our international and political editor Peter Hartcher talks about the reality behind Xi’s current relationship with Australia.

Click the player or watch the video below to listen to the full episode, or read on for an edited extract of the conversation.

Selinger-Morris: We keep being told just what a massive deal this trip to China is. And in particular, how much of Anthony Albanese’s focus has been on strengthening our trade ties with China. So how much trade is he talking about? Is it really that big a deal?

Hartcher: Yes, it is. The trade is big, yes. It’s by far Australia’s biggest trading partner. Biggest export market. And it’s the potential in the future. That’s the real excitement in this trip. Although oddly enough, it’s been largely overlooked by the media covering the story, with the honourable exception of our own correspondent, Paul Sakkal. But that’s been a peculiarity of this trip.

Selinger-Morris: As in, it’s been overshadowed by defence questions for Albanese?

Hartcher: It’s been overshadowed by the pursuit of … a non-issue, actually … it’s a real oddity.

The media coverage, the media travelling party with Albanese – because each major media outlet has a reporter on the trip travelling with the prime minister, including our Paul Sakkal, [who] has done an outstanding job – but the general pack has approached it like, little kids walking past a haunted house, waiting to be scared, waiting to get that shiver of fear, waiting for something to go badly wrong.

Nothing has gone badly wrong. The big picture, as you know, Samantha, is that we have the rare privilege to see an empire collapsing day to day in the news and wilfully, wantonly, Donald Trump handing away ... the unique sources of American strength. Xi Jinping sees that.

Xi Jinping has been saying for a few years now we are seeing changes unseen in 100 years, and Trump is accelerating that.

So what is Xi Jinping trying to do? ... He’s taking the opportunity. As Trump offends all his allies, including Australia. Tariffs everywhere. Alliance insults everywhere. He’s trying to win over as many countries as he can to his plan for global dominance. That is the Xi Jinping plan.

He sees Australia as a ripe fruit that’s ready to fall, and he wants to pluck the fruit and that’s what this trip was about.

This trip. I mean, Albanese got double banquets on the same day in Beijing. He had the president give him a lunch banquet, and then he had the premier give him a dinner banquet … yet, the Australian media got itself mightily distracted by a non-issue that wasn’t even mentioned by Xi Jinping.

And that’s the contention of the port of Darwin, which is a detail of a detail of a problem at a moment when the big picture is the reordering of the entire planet. That’s why I say it’s a real peculiarity that most of our media outlets got carried away by what is really a non-story.

To hear more of Peter Hartcher’s analysis on the big picture and how the reordering of the entire planet could affect Australians, listen to the podcast episode or watch the video above, or click here.

Hear the story behind the headlines on The Morning Edition podcast, every weekday from 5am on Apple, Spotify or your favourite podcast platform.