“When I was a minister, Chinese ministers visited Australia and I visited there in our national interest … promoting Australian jobs,” he said in a radio interview.
While the government should not be free of criticism over its handling of the crucial relationship with our largest trading partner, for Albanese to do so in public, outside the parliament, risks incoherence and division in messaging.
But on cue, Labor’s leader in exile, Bill Shorten and the convener of the Socialist-Left faction in Victoria, Senator Kim Carr also weighed into criticise the government, breaking with bipartisan foreign policy conventions at a critical time.
The Head of National Security College at ANU, Professor Rory Medcalf surmised that Albanese’s remarks were “… political point scoring, maybe touched by lack of experience in foreign policy.”
Political point scoring? There is always that. Every Opposition leader is fixated on an invisible scorecard with runs for and wickets lost self-assessed by media appearances and performances on the floor of the parliament.
But there is more to it.
Labor’s confusion over China is not, as one might guess, a hangover from university days when a nod to Maoism may have been the ideological tipple of the day.
The Left struggles with the reality of China as an autocracy and its dismal history and human rights record is breezily pushed away. It sees the dollar signs up close and personal with the skulls and crossbones pushed back beyond the horizon.
Mistakes were made by the Morrison government certainly, and the megaphone should have been locked away in the cupboard a long time ago. But there will always be difficulties managing a relationship between a dominant autocrat and an open democracy that relies on it for a large portion of its economic activity.
I had a conversation recently with a senior Labor figure, now retired from politics, and predictably, almost organically the discussion turned towards China and specifically Tibet.
The Labor man argued the Dalais, who held political and spiritual leadership for centuries in Tibet, were effectively feudal lords who had done little for the Tibetan people, literacy rates were appallingly low, public health and education almost non-existent.
He was largely right about that. Throughout the first half of the 20th Century the Dalais had shown no capacity or even willingness to improve the lot of their people.
But that does provide no moral justification for what happened in the Tibetan Rebellion in 1959 where an estimated 85,000 Tibetans were killed. Nor does it excuse the privations forced on the Tibetan people in Mao’s Great Leap Forward or the catastrophic consequences of the Cultural Revolution.
All up it cost the lives of over a million Tibetans. The number of monasteries in Tibet has been reduced from thousands to less than ten.
“Mistakes were made” was the response with a shrug of the shoulders. You can’t make an omelette without busting a few heads.
The oppression in Uighur Province forms yet another blind spot. There the CCP has created concentration camps, practices enforced sterilisations, engages in cultural destruction, imprisons people without trial and where extrajudicial killings are commonplace.
These outrages, the Labor identity put down to a state response to a terrorist threat.
The left carries these blind spots on China. It’s troubling. It is always frustrating when smart people cannot see facts before their eyes.
All Australians need to appreciate the true character of the CCP. China is a superpower, it is the ascendant economy in the world today and carries with it a burgeoning military force bristling with fancy new hardware.
The CCP has never been comfortable with its rapid rise as a global superpower. Policy is driven almost by psychosis, by fears both sensible and irrational, driven by Chinese history that has seen empires come and go. It is almost like dealing with a self-conscious adolescent who won the lottery and has more money than he can spend but worries someone might come and steal it.
The creation of artificial islands for use as military bases in the South China Sea is more than an expansionist grab. It is a piece of CCP paranoia that one day the US will blockade its shipping lanes.
Agricultural policy which now expands into the Stans to China’s west is driven by a fear of famine. The Kyrgyzs’ with their meat and dairy-based diets must occasionally wonder why thousands of acres of bok choy and Chinese cabbage are under cultivation in their country. It’s all to feed China.
Similarly trade policy will not allow one country to be a dominant provider of any particular good or service, be they foodstuffs, minerals, technology etc. In 2015, NZ provided 85 per cent of all China’s dairy imports. It is now a lot less but not because New Zealand can’t provide the goods. China does not want to be so reliant.
Of course, the sum of all CCP fears is that China’s burgeoning middle class will one day, perhaps pushed by a crisis, disaster man made or natural, say “We’re very grateful for the refrigerators and the flat screen TVs. But now we want political representation.”
What the Left does understand is that the rise of hundreds of millions of people into the Chinese middle class offers all sorts of economic opportunities for Australia.
What it fails to appreciate is the extent the CCP is prepared to go to deny those people political power. Labor cannot properly manage a relationship with the CCP while it doesn’t understand it and is wilfully blind to some of the ugly elements of its character.
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