As Wong and Dutton exchange fire, the Chinese flotilla laps Australia

The federal government is preparing for a flotilla of Chinese warships to circumnavigate Australia in coming days, as Foreign Minister Penny Wong accused the Coalition of “beating the drums of war” in its response to the naval group’s surprise live-fire exercises in the Tasman Sea.

The partisan stoush over the Chinese navy presence came as former defence force chief Chris Barrie and other military experts warned that building nuclear reactors, as the opposition is planning to do, would be a major national security risk for Australia as each reactor would be a “potential dirty bomb”.

Noting that the three Chinese navy ships – a frigate, cruiser and replenishment vessel – were now 500 kilometres west of Hobart after travelling down the east coast since mid-February, Defence Minister Richard Marles told Sky News that “it’s completely possible that they, given where they are now, that they do end up circumnavigating the continent”.

Marles said HMAS Stuart, an Anzac-class frigate, was shadowing the flotilla to observe its movements and ultimately discern why it had travelled so far from the Chinese mainland.

The US Virginia-class submarine, USS Minnesota arrived at HMAS Stirling in Western Australia on Tuesday for a port visit, underlining how both the US and China see Australia as an increasingly important geostrategic location.

Marles rejected opposition accusations that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had misled the public about the level of warning China gave about last week’s drills, saying: “The prime minister made clear that there was a notification from the Chinese, but in the same breath made clear that that notification was inadequate and whilst it complied with international law, it did not comply with the standards that we bring to bear here.”

Albanese did not raise any concerns about the Chinese notification time being inadequate in his public comments on the day of the exercises.

Marles said it was “really important that we take a deep breath here”, noting the Chinese had complied with international law.

He added that the government was still not sure whether the Chinese ships had conducted a live-fire exercise on Friday or simply notified an intention to do so.

Crew on the New Zealand frigate monitoring the task group reported that it observed behaviour “consistent with a live-fire activity” and monitored the Chinese ships deploying and recovering a floating target, Australian defence officials said last week.

In her opening address to Senate estimates hearings on Thursday, Wong said Australia faced an increasingly uncertain and dangerous geopolitical climate, and that the Coalition was not helping.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong said she had raised concerns about the lack of warning of the exercises with her Chinese counterpart Wang Yi.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

“What Australians don’t want in the face of these circumstances is reckless political games from people who claim to be leaders. We’ve been reminded of that just this week,” Wong said.

“The same people who left a massive gap in the Pacific, the same people who had no regard for the consequences for Australian exporters or Chinese-Australian communities, are at it again, trying to turn China into an election issue.”

Beijing imposed sanctions on $20 billion worth of Australian goods and cut off diplomatic relations when bilateral relations plummeted under the Morrison government. Chinese-Australian voters subsequently swung strongly against the Liberal Party at the 2022 election.

“We have been very clear China is going to keep being China, just as Mr Dutton isn’t going to stop being Mr Dutton, the man who once said it was inconceivable we wouldn’t go to war is going to keep beating the drums of war,” Wong said.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton told 2GB radio on Thursday: “The prime minister is either making this up, shooting from the hip, or completely out of his depth – or maybe all three.”

He continued: “But what we do know is that he is at odds with the chief of the Defence Force, and he needs to explain why, on such a totemic issue, he either wasn’t briefed, that he’s made up the facts, that he’s got it wrong. I mean, what could possibly be the logic or the rationale here?”

Accusing the opposition of engaging in “bellicose rhetoric” and “war talk”, Wong said: “Gunboat diplomacy is a return to the guns-of-war rhetoric.”

Referring to Dutton’s courting of Chinese-Australian voters in marginal seats, Wong said: “I don’t think it’s reasonable for the leader of the opposition to tell people in Menzies and Bennelong he is ‘pro-China’ ... and then engage in that sort of rhetoric in Canberra.”

Wong said she had raised the lack of warning of the live-fire drills in a meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi at the G20 foreign ministers’ meeting in Johannesburg over the weekend.

Defence Force chief David Johnston said on Wednesday that the Australian military only learned about the exercises after being alerted by Airservices Australia 40 minutes after the live-fire window began.

Airservices Australia had been tipped off by a Virgin Australia pilot 10 minutes earlier.

Wong said Dutton had waited four days to seek a government briefing on the live fire exercises, saying: “If this is such a big issue for you, surely you would have been pretty quick to request a briefing from the government, but you weren’t.”

Commenting on the Coalition’s proposal to establish a nuclear reactor industry in Australia, Chris Barrie, who led the defence force from 1998 to 2001, said: “Every nuclear power facility is a potential dirty bomb because rupture of containment facilities can cause devastating damage.

“Modern warfare is increasingly focused on missiles and uncrewed aerial systems, and with the proposed power stations all located within 100 kilometres of the coast, they are a clear and accessible target”.

Barrie is now an executive member of the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group, a collection of national security experts advocating ambitious action to tackle climate change.

Cheryl Durrant, a former senior defence official, said that “nuclear facilities would necessitate expensive and complex missile defence systems as well as allocated cyber and counter-intelligence resources, making our security challenge more complex and expensive”.

Opposition home affairs spokesman James Paterson described Wong as being “very defensive” and said the government’s handling of the incident was “utterly shambolic”.

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