Scott Morrison could use a playbook for peace with China
The fallout from the inquiry into alleged Australian war crimes in Afghanistan was always bound to be ugly. The past few days have shown this in damaging and dramatic ways as Australia’s most senior soldier was repudiated by his Prime Minister and the relationship with China spiralled. And it’s only the beginning.
In a serious humiliation, Chief of the Defence Force Angus Campbell was forced by Scott Morrison to beat a hasty retreat on plans to strip 3000 Afghan veterans of their Meritorious Unit Citation. Campbell, who was left on his own to release the Brereton report and to flag retribution while the most senior politicians, including Morrison, ducked for cover, was left exposed again, dangling, hung out to cop the fury, including demands he resign.
Campbell had miscalculated and he may yet be an early casualty of the inquiry. Morrison miscalculated too by not fronting early to handle such a delicate operation and to make clear from the outset the innocent would not be punished with the guilty. He waited days to appear, then took almost two weeks to succumb to public pressure to countermand his generals.
Worse followed when the inquiry’s graphic descriptions of alleged atrocities, including the killing of children, enabled Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs deputy director-general Zhao Lijian to strike deep into the heart of Australians and how they see themselves by tweeting a grotesque fake image of an Australian soldier killing an Afghan child. It was the lowest of many low points so far in the relationship, which has spiralled in the past few months. The great worry is that there is a long way to go before we reach rock bottom.
Even while he raged over the tweet, demanding an apology that was never going to be given, the Prime Minister appealed for a reset of the relationship. China contemptuously doubled down.
We were probably always destined to reach this point, but there are matters that could have been handled differently, which might have delayed the confrontation or kept things civil.
The tipping point is acknowledged by many experts to be the day in April when Foreign Minister Marise Payne, without warning or the cover of supportive allies, announced Australia would take the lead in pushing for an international inquiry into the origins of COVID-19. It was popular domestically. People whose lives and jobs had been disrupted were rightly furious with China.
A few old China watchers vented at the time, believing there was too much politics and too little strategic thinking behind the government’s push. They saw it as the latest in a series of actions, some warranted, others gratuitous, that would certainly invite retaliation.
Others viewed it as a legitimate intervention with legitimate questions for China.
Former long-serving Labor foreign minister Gareth Evans listed the missteps in a recent article. “(There is) too much tone-deaf stridency in our language, starting with the way Malcolm Turnbull introduced the undue influence legislation in 2017; too much over the top behaviour, as in the ASIO/AFP raids on Chinese journalists; and too much unchecked offensiveness in parliamentary performances by Senator (Eric) Abetz and his fellow Wolverines,” Evans wrote.
“Accompanying this, there has been a failure to fully factor in the risks — for a country of our economic vulnerability and at best middleweight — of not only irritating but hurting China, as we have done in not just joining but leading the international charge on Huawei, tough foreign investment restrictions and foreign influence laws.
“Again, too many of the stands we have taken — those just mentioned, and above all our operationally and diplomatically ill-prepared braying for an inquiry into China’s COVID response — have played all too readily into the United States ‘Deputy Sheriff’ narrative, and as such left us open to even heavier counter-punching. We are an easier and more vulnerable target than the US itself ever will be.”
Evans describes the tweet, which emerged after his article was published, as vulgar and immature. He concedes it might enable the government to claim the high ground, but it would be only temporary and not enough to win the battle. “Overall, we are still in a deep hole and it’s a hole significantly of our own making,” he tells me. His advice to the government: when you’re in a hole, stop digging. Others, including former senior diplomats, urge Morrison to remain calm, stay quiet, avoid further action directed against China, then hope the Biden presidency induces Xi Jinping to be more amenable to a reset.
Peter Jennings, executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, has a different take, dismissing criticisms of the government as another version of “shut up and take the money”. Jennings wholly approves of all the government’s actions to date. He says China is so different now that what made the relationship work in the 1990s no longer works. He says if Australia had caved on the list of 14 grievances Chinese embassy officials had given to journalists, “we wouldn’t be the Australia that I grew up in”.
Old enough to remember when Australia was dependent on Britain, then Japan, Jennings accuses the business community of “getting lazy”, selling to an easy market such as China when they should be diversifying.
“The business community wants to snap back to the good old days. There is no snap back,” he says. He predicts it could take five years for Australia to wean itself off China, but he is confident it will happen.
He is equally confident Morrison will hold firm to his existing strategy and will not back away when it comes to questions of sovereignty or values.
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