China spy ship must be checked

Anthony Albanese is badly misguided in his argument that the presence of a Chinese intelligence-gathering survey ship near vital communications infrastructure in our territorial waters is equivalent to our naval presence in the South China Sea. In our case, we are defending freedom of navigation through trade routes central to our economic future. We are part of a global effort to assert a rules-based order and push back on the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to increase territorial reach to the detriment of near neighbours and the world.

China’s naval and intelligence-gathering presence in the Pacific and offshore Australia is something altogether different. A circumnavigation of the continent involving live-fire exercises by the Chinese navy was calculated to send a direct message about Chinese power and Australian vulnerability. The research vessel surveying our territorial waters mirrors the activities being conducted by the CCP against its near neighbours whose territorial rights it does not respect.

As Amanda Hodge reports, last June, Hanoi publicly demanded China’s Hai Yang 26 vessel end its “illegal survey activities” within Vietnam’s exclusive economic zone and continental shelf. Chinese survey and coast guard vessels have been a constant irritant in Indonesia’s Natuna waters in the south of the South China Sea. Former Indonesian president Joko Widodo twice used naval ships as a prop to publicly reinforce his country’s sovereignty. In contrast, Mr Albanese appears not to know whose job it should be to pay attention. In the case of the naval visit it was a Virgin commercial aircraft that notified us of the live-fire exercises. In the latest example of Chinese snooping interference, the embarrassing incursion is being handballed between Defence and the Australian Border Force. This is despite the warning from security experts that dual-use Chinese research vessel Tan Sun Yi Hat is almost certainly gathering undersea data to assist in future Chinese submarine operations.

Mr Albanese’s response has been to say: “I would prefer that it wasn’t there. But we live in circumstances where, just as Australia has vessels in the South China Sea and vessels in the Taiwan Strait and a range of areas, this vessel is there.”

Security experts are in no doubt about what is going on. The ship is equipped with manned and unmanned submarines and, according to the China Daily, “serves as a base for the submersible, deep-sea expeditions and engineering”.

The CCP intrusion is no doubt a political irritant. But it serves to demonstrate that the CCP has little respect for those who do not stand up for themselves. The Albanese government has been lulled into accommodation through trade appeasement that has compromised its ability to speak plainly and act bravely in the face of obvious provocations.