While much of the media has again been rallying around the Labor Party on the issue, it should be clear to all nonpartisan journalists that the Albanese government cannot deal with bullying by China.
This is not just about live-firing exercises in the Tasman Sea last Friday week by three Chinese naval ships – and perhaps one nuclear submarine, according to Australian Defence Force chief Admiral David Johnston.
The government says this clear attempt to demonstrate China’s power to the people of Australia and New Zealand is nothing to worry about. Just as well, given it became clear in the Senate last Tuesday that neither our military nor government knew about the live firing until a Virgin pilot alerted aviation authorities.
Foreign Minister Penny Wong told the Senate last Thursday that Opposition Leader Peter Dutton was just making political trouble with the issue. Defence Minister Richard Marles came close to speaking up for China when he said Australia also sent ships to the South China Sea.
Both were pathetic in defending the national interest. The Prime Minister was simply his usual sloppy self, getting the entire sequence of events wrong about the live-fire warning.
Yet Albanese and Wong have claimed since 2022 that “the adults are now back in charge” of the China relationship.
Underpinning this is the idea former prime minister Scott Morrison was wrong to demand an investigation into the origins of Covid-19 in the Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019 and early 2020.
Yet clearly Morrison was right: the US now says Covid most likely emerged in a laboratory.
Albanese and Wong have made much of the lifting of China’s bans on Australian exports of wine, lobsters and barley imposed to punish Australia over Morrison’s Covid inquiry calls.
Never mind lost revenue nationally in those industries was more than offset by soaring prices paid by China for Australian iron ore and coal.
These record iron and coal export values fed into the two accidental surpluses delivered by Treasurer Jim Chalmers in his first two budgets. The Productivity Commission did the maths on the cost of China’s sanctions and it was nine one-thousandths of a percentage point of GDP, or $225m.
Add to this the slowdown in the Chinese economy and the determination of Xi Jinping that industry move from steelmaking to higher-value production, and the economic picture here is not quite as rosy as Albanese pretends.
Even though it accounts for 40 per cent of our exports, the value of our sales to China last year actually fell more than 9 per cent to $213.7bn – “more than wiping out gains from Australian agricultural products that Beijing has allowed to return to its market”, according to this newspaper’s Will Glasgow on January 29.
Lowy Institute China specialist Richard McGregor, writing for The Australian Financial Review on January 27, asked whether the Australia-China trade relationship had already passed “peak complementarity”.
While China will remain central to our trading, McGregor said the election of Donald Trump was likely to change priorities in Beijing and Canberra as the US focused on acquiring new supplies of critical minerals, applying tariffs on China and forcing US allies to increase defence spending.
Neither side of politics here has much to be proud of in defence. We are 10 years from acquiring a nuclear submarine under our $368bn deal with the US and UK after scrapping plans under Liberal PM Tony Abbott to buy conventional subs from Japan, and then under Liberal PM Malcolm Turnbull to buy French diesel electric subs.
Whatever Morrison’s faults, he made the correct decision on AUKUS.
Turnbull in 2018 got China policy right on foreign interference laws and blocking Huawei from access to the Australian 5G telecommunications rollout.
All three Coalition PMs strengthened defence co-operation with the US and Japan and joined air and sea patrols to ensure freedom of navigation in the South China Sea.
Analysts have to go back to the first Rudd government and its May 2009 Defence White Paper to find a Labor leader ready to call out China’s military bullying.
That paper argued “the pace, scope and structure of China’s military modernisation have the potential to give its neighbours cause for concern”.
The best that can be said for Albanese, Wong and Marles is they have not totally bungled the alliance with the US – although they have fumbled on Israel. And they have held firm on AUKUS.
Europe, faced with statements from Trump and his Vice President, JD Vance, that the US will not act as the world’s policeman to ensure the fate of Ukraine, is in a continental pickle. Yet Europe and Ukraine face a decrepit power in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which has a GDP not much larger than Australia’s.
Australia is being bullied by a great power with a GDP not much smaller than America’s, 1.4 billion people and a larger navy and army than the US.
Albanese brags his government has signed a peace, climate and migration plan with Tuvalu, population 10,000. It’s one pillar in the government’s courting of the South Pacific to keep China out.
It’s not working: in the midst of its naval exercise last week, China announced a deal with the Cook Islands for rare earth mining.
NZ Foreign Minister Winston Peters raised it in a meeting with China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Vice President Han Zheng in Beijing last week. NZ and Cook Islands maintain a free association, sharing a head of state and citizenship rights.
The Cook Islands deal follows China’s pacts with Solomon Islands and PNG on police training. Australia has had to step up its rival police funding to compensate.
Albanese is also using sport diplomacy to keep Beijing at bay by offering PNG $600m over 10 years to set up an NRL club joining the Australian competition in 2028. Australia is the main source of aid to PNG, last year contributing $640m, 48 per cent of all PNG’s aid, compared with China’s 12 per cent.
Albanese should play hard ball with Pacific countries that play up concerns about climate change.
Start with the truth: some South Pacific states are rewarding China – the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide – while damaging longstanding relations with Australia and New Zealand, which contribute just over 1 per cent of global emissions.
Australia also needs to lobby the Trump administration about the Pacific.
In November, president Joe Biden’s then US defence secretary Lloyd Austin visited Suva and pledged $4.9m to modernise Fiji’s military. The two countries are negotiating a “status of forces agreement” on future defence co-operation.
China’s media says its naval exercise in the Tasman is the same as Australia’s conduct in the South China Sea. Our government seems to agree.
Except the Tasman is not a global sea route. Nor is Australia threatening territories in the region.
China is threatening territory and waters belonging to Japan, Thailand, The Philippines and Vietnam throughout the South China Sea. And it threatens to invade Taiwan.
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