In a new cold war, Albanese and Forrest should choose their sides carefully
Whether the Fortescue executive chairman believes China’s propaganda or simply mouths it, Andrew Forrest’s upbeat take on Beijing’s ‘beautiful evolution’ is, in truth, the entry price into the court of Xi Jinping.
In a remarkable column in The Australian on Thursday, Fortescue executive chairman and founder Andrew Forrest claimed that past Australian governments had treated China as an enemy and “chose to sow fear over fostering respect”.
Forrest claims Anthony Albanese has overcome these mistakes because “he understands China and how to build partnerships”. Now, Australia and China must together teach “friends in North America what is possible when respect triumphs over fear”.
On Friday Australia signed a 50-year AUKUS agreement with our friends in the UK. This is a big step forward in practical defence cooperation, a far cry from Beijing’s banquets and panda theatre. Forrest is completely tone deaf to the geopolitical shifts which make China more of a risk than an opportunity.
Four concerns stand out to me in this astonishing misrepresentation of China’s intent and Australia’s behaviour during the past decade.
My first concern is that Forrest is never shy to talk up his own book. He and other “iron ore majors” are big taxpayers, he tells us – so we had better listen.
He has made “lifelong friends” and operated “in good faith” in China; he has witnessed the “beautiful evolution” of China’s modernisation.
What Forrest doesn’t mention is the extensive public funding his ventures have received from Australian state and federal governments to promote renewable energy projects, the Gladstone hydrogen plant and, perhaps less environmentally sound but a nice little earner anyway, diesel fuel subsidies.
It is expected that Fortescue will be a major beneficiary from the $1 billion that the Albanese government splurged last February to create a fund supporting the manufacture of green iron and its supply chains.
Forrest wants “governments willing to back ambition with policy certainty”. To be clear, it’s his ambition that must be backed and “policy certainty” means public support to achieve his private sector goals.
“We owe it to the next century to get this right.” That means a China that wants Fortescue products and an Australia that will help Forrest make “big bets on the future”.
It is a remarkable testimony to Forrest’s drive and personal confidence that he sees no gap between his personal interest and Australia’s national interest. Indeed, an Australian government not aligned to this aim is one that will “drift back into the old ways of suspicion and division”. He has seen the future. To echo Louis XIV: “The future, it is me.”
My second concern about Forrest’s article is the astonishing way in which it fails to address any negative aspect of China’s behaviour towards Australia in the past few years. In fact, the article says, “for reasons that had little to do with facts and everything to do with politics” previous Australian governments had damaged the relationship.
This mirrors the Chinese Communist Party’s longstanding line that any damage to the relationship is Australia’s fault.
In fact, Forrest’s opening line is “if you treat someone like an enemy for long enough, eventually they will become one”. This echoes the charge made by a Chinese embassy official in 2020 when handing to journalists the notorious 14-point “grievance list” about Australian bad behaviour: “China is angry. If you make China the enemy, China will be the enemy.”
This newspaper has reported on Forrest’s past reluctance to discuss uncomfortable aspects of Chinese behaviour. Despite leading a global campaign against modern slavery in July 2019, Forrest said he didn’t have enough information about China’s treatment of Uighurs to offer clear comment: “I’m not close enough to make an authoritative statement on any country but I can firmly say that every country has modern slavery.”
Forrest claims to have made more than 50 visits to China. None gave him an insight into the internationally recognised situation of the Uighurs. China is one of the worst abusers of modern slavery, including of people forced to make items imported into Australia.
In Australia, but not in China, the Fortescue executive chairman can write and say whatever he wants about “facts” without consequence.
He appears to take no position on Beijing’s persecution of ethnic and religious minorities; the suppression of political dissent and the arrest and disappearance of regime opponents; the use of propaganda and indoctrination to brainwash the population and surveillance technology to control them.
Forrest may choose to ignore China’s use of cyber and human espionage to steal intellectual property around the world; to harass Australians of Chinese ethnicity, known to the regime as “overseas Chinese”, using embassy staff and a self-appointed cadre of Communist Party enforcers to keep diaspora communities under their thumb.
It is possible – admittedly with some effort – to remain uninformed about China’s attempts to covertly control national elites in many countries, influence election outcomes, pass funds to politicians, co-opt Pacific Island leaders and control Chinese language media globally.
Harder still, but perhaps still possible, is ignoring Beijing’s annexation and militarisation of the South China Sea; the People’s Liberation Army’s hostility to foreign military forces; threats directed against Taiwan; and use, quite literally, of gunboat diplomacy.
And Forrest can choose to blame all bad things on the Morrison government. It’s his civic right to do so. But let’s just note in passing that if Forrest were to be critical of any aspect of the CCP’s rule, his “more than 50” visits would come to an end and Fortescue staff in China would risk arrest and physical harassment.
The happy world of Fortescue’s upward trajectory in China would stop, just as it has for many local and international companies that fall out of favour with the communists.
Does Forrest think for one second that China would keep buying his exports out of friendship if cheaper, better quality and dependable supplies could be sourced elsewhere? That would fundamentally misread what Xi Jinping wants from relations with Australia.
Whether the Fortescue executive chairman believes the propaganda or simply mouths it, Forrest’s upbeat take on Beijing’s “beautiful evolution” is, in truth, the entry price into the court of Xi.
My third concern is that Forrest may be right in his assessment of Albanese: “I congratulate the Prime Minister for his deliberate, rational and values-based leadership. He gets it – he understands China and how to build partnerships,” Forrest wrote.
“When Anthony Albanese sat down with Xi Jinping, we saw something we haven’t seen for years: two leaders talking as equals, with mutual respect.” This is a relationship, Forrest says, built on “renewed trust”.
Xi and his underlings in the Communist Party, the bureaucracy, academia and the state-controlled media never hold back their very evident contempt for Australia – the “gum stuck to the bottom of China’s shoe”.
This contempt was a mainstay of the so-called wolf warrior diplomacy, where for a couple of years the party revealed its real opinions about the “foreign barbarians” it seeks to dominate.
A French diplomat once dryly told me that the Chinese regarded France as a barely passable third-order civilisation. Be assured that Australia is lower down the scale in Beijing’s mind.
The CCP does not do relations between equals and mutual respect. Everything about Albanese’s recent visit was designed to cast him – and Australia – as a deferential supplicant. To be sure, a friendly one – and far easier to do business with than the Morrison government – but a supplicant, nonetheless.
There is a risk that Albanese really does think he has developed a trusting relationship with Xi. Asked about this on the ABC’s 7.30 program, Albanese said his hour-long private lunch with Xi “shows a level of engagement there and building personal relations … I have said before that anything that he has said to me has been fulfilled.”
When pressed on whether he trusted Xi, the Prime Minister said, “I have no reason to point to any breach that has occurred up to this point.”
So, Xi’s duplicitous use of trade embargos to pursue political aims; arresting and holding Australian citizens on fake charges; the endless cyber spying; paying former Labor senator Sam Dastyari to endorse China’s island building in the South China Sea; undermining Australia in the Pacific and Southeast Asia; attacking AUKUS and the US alliance – these things aren’t signs of breaches of trust?
In my view Xi can be trusted to maintain a relentless focus on achieving his major strategic objectives. That is a very different thing to saying Xi’s relationship with Albanese is one built on mutual respect between equals.
Unlike Forrest, Albanese cannot maintain that he doesn’t have a detailed knowledge of China’s malign behaviour and its constant attempts to weaken our relationship with the US and with Indo-Pacific countries.
Albanese has at his disposal a high-quality intelligence apparatus that tells him in fine detail what China does daily to undermine Australia. But in reality you don’t need the intelligence information. A relatively inquiring mind with access to a smartphone will be able to build a similar understanding based on publicly available information.
Albanese’s language during and after the Beijing visit suggests he genuinely believes the dinners, the military bands, the panda viewing, the empty speeches, private tourism and the oh-so-special hour-long private lunch shows that he, in Forrest’s words, “understands China and how to build partnerships”.
Xi may conclude that in matters to do with Australia he will see an Albanese come his way just once. Forrest might have a similar view.
That takes me to my fourth concern about the Forrest article, which is that I can’t think of an Australian businessman who has quite so thoroughly thrown his lot behind one political party; well, actually two – the Labor Party and the Chinese Communist Party, specifically Xi’s CCP.
Forrest says: “Ever since I was at school, I have found that if you treat someone like an enemy for long enough, eventually they will become one.”
On Australian domestic politics Forrest may calculate that the Liberal and Nationals Coalition is so beaten down that it will never rise to present a challenge to his world view. He may be right, but there is a circularity in politics that one day may make Forrest’s bet look less of a sure thing.
As for the dominance of Xi, in time he too will pass. That may be sooner than many in Australia imagine. There is already speculation that Xi is under some challenge from those in the CCP who are coming to view his authoritarian rule as disastrous for the party’s long-term hold on power.
Forrest’s positioning makes me think of those in British business before World War II supporting the Anglo-German Fellowship. The group aimed in the 1930s “to promote good fellowship between Great Britain and Germany and their respective peoples”. The fellowship wound up operations in September 1939.
No one sensible would want conflict with China but we are sliding into a new cold war where the risks of appeasement actually hasten the arrival of a hot war.
We desperately need our government to think in clearer terms about the limits to desirable co-operation with China. Going all-in on green steel or any other technology will make us more dependent and less able to assert our sovereign interests.
In a new cold war Albanese and Forrest should choose their sides carefully; history will judge them by events still unfolding.
On one point, I agree with Forrest: “We owe it to the next century to get this right.” But that means understanding who – and what – we’re dealing with, before we lose the chance to choose for ourselves.
Peter Jennings is director of Strategic Analysis Australia and was executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute from 2012 to 2022. He is a former deputy secretary for strategy in the Defence Department (2009-12).
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