Six days, just in China – Anthony Albanese is making a big statement without saying anything
The Albanese odyssey suggests the government is changing Australia’s strategic settings with Beijing – and that would be a terrible mistake.
Under Mao Zedong, China stood up, under Deng Xiaoping it became prosperous, under Xi Jinping it became powerful.
– Report to the 19th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, 2017
China is on a dangerous course … Its drills around Taiwan are rehearsals (for invasion) not exercises.
– Admiral Samuel Paparo, commander of the US Indo-Pacific Command, Hawaii, May 2025
China has always viewed Australia and China-Australia relations from a strategic and long-term perspective, committed to advancing bilateral ties beyond stabilisation and towards progress.
– Xiao Qian, ambassador of the People’s Republic of China to Australia, July 7, 2025
Anthony Albanese takes off on Saturday for an extended trip to the People’s Republic of China. The trip heralds another sudden lurch in Australia’s China policy, this time unannounced. But the optics are everything. This is the longest, single bilateral visit to any foreign country that Albanese has made as Prime Minister.
That tells you everything.
But there’s much more. The chief executives of 14 of Australia’s biggest companies are accompanying Albanese. This is meant to be a good news trip. Three cities – Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu. The Prime Minister may even be inveigled into hugging a panda.
This is the way prime ministers visited the PRC in the glory days of the 1990s. Trade, trade and more trade, soaring toasts to never-ending friendship and let’s not talk about human rights. For some Labor foreign policy aficionados it is forever 1990 and Paul Keating is just about to trounce John Hewson.
The Chinese media has hailed Albanese and praised Australia for being the first US ally to have made a big switch back to Beijing since Washington became publicly so critical of the PRC. There’s no need to believe the Chinese media but it knows what messages it wants to broadcast.
The PRC’s ambassador in Canberra has penned two sharp, meddlesome, newspaper articles. The first instructed Albanese to reject Donald Trump’s request to lift defence spending from the current 2 per cent of GDP to 3.5 per cent of GDP. This would be most unwise, the ambassador counselled. It would limit social spending and reflect an outdated Cold War mentality.
Albanese has indeed refused the Trump defence spending request and the similar suggestion by all the Australian advisers such as Angus Houston, Dennis Richardson and Peter Dean.
Beijing is delighted. Then the ambassador turned to economics: why not extend the China-Australia free trade agreement to intimate co-operation on artificial intelligence? That was a bold suggestion.
Australian intelligence agencies routinely brief government that the No.1 author of cyber intrusion across Australian government and industry is Beijing. Government leaders and senior officials have been required for this trip to the PRC to leave their personal mobile phones and iPads behind as they would be hacked in the PRC.
Anyone notice a certain irony?
Australia was the first Western nation to ban Chinese telco Huawei from its 5G network. It’s inconceivable that there could be a special AI deal. Which underlines how self-confident and expansive the ambassador was feeling.
For context, let’s go back five years, to 2020, when these issues were discussed more frequently and frankly. In his memoirs, former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull observes: “What’s become increasingly apparent over the last decade is the industrial scale, scope and effectiveness of Chinese intelligence gathering and in particular cyberespionage. They do more of it than anyone else, by far, and apply more resources to it than anyone else … They’re very good at it … they’re not embarrassed by being caught.”
The whole Albanese odyssey is more than raising eyebrows in Washington. When the Trump administration imposed a 10 per cent tariff on Australia, as low as on any nation, Albanese said this wasn’t the act of a friend. Yet when Beijing sent a naval flotilla to conduct live-fire exercises in the Tasman Sea, without notifying Canberra, forcing civilian flights to divert suddenly, and when that same naval taskforce circumnavigated Australia while another People’s Liberation Army Navy taskforce loitered northwest of Australia, Albanese stressed that Beijing had not broken international law.
He might have said these were not the actions of a friend; instead he wanted to defend Beijing.
Here’s another little-noticed double standard. Albanese had no interest in meeting US Vice-President JD Vance when they were in Rome for pope Francis’s funeral. Albanese said as Prime Minister he dealt with the President. This was either unbelievably rude and stupid or the worst attempt at humour in history.
With the PRC, Albanese plainly regards himself as occupying an inferior position to President Xi Jinping. The formal leaders dialogue, when it takes place, is not between Xi and Albanese but between Chinese Premier Li Qiang, plainly the PRC’s No.2, and the Australian Prime Minister. A US vice-president, nationally elected, sits higher in his government than a premier does in the PRC.
Now, Albanese is making a big statement without saying anything – six days, just in the PRC. No North Asian swing with a couple of days in Japan, our close quasi-ally and most important Asian partner, nor in Seoul; just the PRC.
The sheer, brazen one-sidedness of all this imagery and contrast must have hit home to the Albanese government, for senior government ministers made a series of interventions that reasserted common sense and put some minimal limits on the PRC relationship. Albanese himself dismissed the fantastical idea of a Beijing-Canberra partnership on AI.
Jim Chalmers told the Chinese that Canberra would not weaken its restrictions on PRC investment in Australian critical infrastructure and security-sensitive sectors. The Treasurer somewhat disingenuously said these restrictions weren’t country specific. The restrictions, it’s true, do not just apply to the PRC. Russia also would have a hard time getting approval. But they do discriminate between allies and strategic competitors, between “safe” investors and investors who carry security risk. Chalmers also reiterated that the Albanese government would force the Chinese-owned Landbridge to sell the lease to the Port of Darwin.
Then, on the eve of Albanese’s trip, Foreign Minister Penny Wong, in Kuala Lumpur, made the sort of speech that in recent months only Defence Minister Richard Marles has been willing or allowed to make. In a wide-ranging speech about Australian policy in the region, she said: “China continues to assert its strategic influence and project its military power into our region. And we have seen the worrying pace of China’s nuclear and conventional military build-up, without the transparency that the region expects.” Wong has said this sort of thing before but not much recently. Compared with Albanese’s statements over the past months, it’s Godzilla-like.
Wong also said Australia was committed to its alliance with the US and a US presence in the region was necessary for stability.
So Albanese on AI, Chalmers on foreign investment and the Port of Darwin, and a more old-fashioned foreign policy speech from Wong, these constituted important, if late, remedial messaging from the government, designed more for Washington than any other audience.
Nonetheless, I think the Chinese media has more than half a point when it suggests the Albanese government is changing Australia’s strategic settings.
The change is not so much from the Morrison government to the Albanese government as a change from Albanese in his last year as opposition leader and first year or 18 months as Prime Minister and Albanese today.
Australia’s policy towards China has had numerous giant lurches in our history and we seem to be on the brink of another one. It may be the combination of Trump, a US President who is wildly unpopular in Australia, and Labor’s out-size parliamentary majority, despite its low primary vote, has convinced the Albanese government it can push back and be its true left-of-centre self on foreign policy.
As opposition leader, Albanese worked hard and smart to project himself as reliable on security. In an interview with me he said his government would go well beyond 2 per cent of GDP for defence if that was necessary for Australian security. He also favourably referenced, without quite committing to them, a series of defence initiatives he hasn’t bothered to pursue in office.
Labor had been nine years in opposition, after a brief six years in government. Scott Morrison presented the initial AUKUS nuclear submarine deal to Labor on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. The Labor brains trust was convinced of the superiority of nuclear submarines but also felt it had to say yes to AUKUS or the electorate might regard Labor as anti-alliance, anti-American and anti-security.
Labor then just managed to squeak into office with a very small parliamentary majority. Joe Biden was US president. Politically, ideologically, he occupied the same space on the spectrum as Albanese.
The first big challenge was to sell AUKUS to the Labor rank and file, who were suspicious of it. Many of them hate it to this day. It calls forth their atavistic anti-Americanism, nuclear phobias, discomfort with military power, and it diverts money from social spending.
So Labor ran a strong line that Australia faced the most dangerous strategic circumstances in its history since World War II. Many eminent folks said this, mainly because it’s true.
Former defence force chief Angus Houston said he thought strategic circumstances the worst of his lifetime. This all worked well enough in getting the Labor rank and file to grudgingly accept AUKUS.
Labor did change the Morrison era rhetoric on the PRC and talked about “stabilising” the relationship with Beijing. But its speeches and comments fairly routinely cited the China threat. Wong was active in the South Pacific trying to stop Beijing executing security agreements and getting special port facilities that could in time become a military base.
It’s reasonable now to ask whether Albanese didn’t say all that stuff about security simply because the government thought it politically necessary. Albanese comes from Labor’s anti-American Left. He chummed up naturally with Jeremy Corbyn when Corbyn led Labour in Britain.
Before Albanese became leader he sometimes told friends and acquaintances he thought the China threat was exaggerated. He privately told people that even the dangers of PRC foreign interference in Australia were exaggerated. Beijing was just doing what all countries do.
Further evidence for this interpretation is that there has been virtually no increase in defence spending, or rather a very small, incremental increase. If these are the most dangerous strategic circumstances since World War II, how is it that defence spending was 2 per cent of GDP when Albanese came to office and it’s still 2 per cent now, the nominal dollar increase almost entirely explained by inflation and population growth?
Albanese and his ministers, and government spokespeople, almost never now talk about the most dangerous strategic circumstances, which in the early days was a straightforward euphemism for the Chinese military threat. The politics has changed.
The Albanese government isn’t worried any longer about justifying AUKUS to its rank and file, it’s now worried about the Trump administration, its own advisers and every realistic defence and strategic analyst in Australia saying it needs to spend billions more dollars on defence.
Now, when it speaks of a dangerous international environment, the government tends to cite global disruption. Sometimes it even presents great power conflict as the evil in itself, a shocking formulation that effectively equates our democratic ally, the US, with the PRC and Russia.
How else does this trip represent a change in policy? Well, if strategic circumstances were the most dangerous since World War II just 18 months ago, they certainly haven’t improved. Yet there’s no sign Albanese will have anything remotely resembling frank dialogue with Beijing over its behaviour in the region.
Not only that, for more than a decade it has been Australian policy to diversify trade beyond the PRC because we’re dangerously dependent on China. It takes more than a third of our total exports. The two economies are naturally complementary. We’re a quarry, the PRC’s a building site. Yet as Euan Graham from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute points out, this trip not only puts trade vastly above strategic interests but, he says, “even in economic terms, this trip is designed to actually increase our dependency on China”.
Beijing’s behaviour in recent years has been appalling. Domestically it has become effectively Stalinist, repressing religion, repressing ethnic minorities, putting an end to human rights law activism, suppressing rights in Hong Kong. Internationally it humiliated Australia in the middle of an election with its naval incursions into our waters. It conducts occasional dangerous interactions with our navy ships and air force planes. It still has an Australian, writer Yang Hengjun, wrongly imprisoned. It routinely enters Taiwanese and Japanese air space and waters with aggressive military manoeuvres.
As Marles has pointed out, it has undertaken the biggest military build-up since World War II, including the most rapid expansion of its nuclear weapons arsenal and long range missiles. It has illegally occupied and constructed islands in the South China Sea, from which its missiles could easily hit Australia. It relentlessly seeks a military base in the South Pacific. It has intruded militarily into Vietnamese waters and is constantly harassing Philippines shipping.
But you’ll hear none of this from Albanese. He and his government have lost the inclination, perhaps even the ability, to undertake a serious strategic conversation with the Australian people.
Since World War II our policy towards China has lurched radically. Just after the war, we appreciated the Chinese Nationalists who were our allies in the Pacific war. We were horrified at the communist takeover in 1949 and more horrified again by the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. In that period, the PRC was the chief sponsor of insurgency in Southeast Asia, especially in Vietnam and Indo-China.
After Richard Nixon’s 1971 opening to China, designed to counter the Soviet Union, we got fully on board with that and saw great economic potential. We were knocked off course a bit by the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, but the lure of Chinese money soon had us back under its spell.
Then, around 2008-09, we realised that Beijing was acquiring huge offensive military capabilities. This led to Kevin Rudd’s tough-minded 2009 defence white paper. The Howard government was strategically at one with the Americans and convinced Beijing to emphasise areas we could agree on. About a decade ago, as Beijing ramped up its efforts to push the Americans out of the region, the strategic side all started to go bad again. But we’ve never been quite as confused and incoherent, as distracted and ineffective, as determined to look away from reality as we are today.
This has been substantially a bipartisan failure. The Morrison government deserves the greatest credit for standing up to Beijing’s efforts at intimidation and, with its Coalition predecessors, taking proactive action on foreign interference, investment in critical infrastructure, identifying the potential problems with Huawei and so on. However, it made a series of grave mistakes that have contributed to the tangled mess we have on China policy. In several key ways, it undermined the credibility of government in national security generally and PRC policy specifically.
First, Morrison and defence minister Peter Dutton were even more alarmist about the strategic environment of the time, often comparing it with the 1930s. Yet, even though they spewed money forth at an unbelievable rate, they did almost nothing to expand Australia’s conventional military capabilities. If you talk crisis but do nothing, people realise you’re having a lend of them.
Second, they committed to AUKUS and wedged Labor into following them without honestly and immediately telling the nation this would require a vast increase in the defence budget. The excuse was they had to wait to see how they would get the nuclear subs before they could estimate the cost.
But every nation that gets nuclear subs finds they are immensely expensive, however you get them. The Morrison government should have told the nation the AUKUS subs would mean a permanent 0.5 per cent of GDP more on defence. Labor would have gone along. But the Liberals, like Labor today, were scared of spending any money on defence.
The public ultimately could see the actions didn’t match the words and became cynical about the words.
Worst of all, Morrison and Dutton talked foolishly and too often about war with China, in the context of joining the US in defending Taiwan, whereas they should have been talking about stable deterrence.
This bellicose rhetoric at first succeeded politically. People took their government seriously and rallied around the flag. But again, when people saw that this rhetoric was accompanied by no action and seemed unrelated to any specific event, the government’s standing declined. This also allowed the organs of the PRC and the Labor Party to convince many ethnic Chinese Australians that the Coalition was prejudiced against them.
Albanese has now repeated the Morrison-Dutton mistakes but from the other end of the spectrum, so to speak. The bottom line is it still does nothing of consequence on defence, is completely unrealistic about the costs of AUKUS and doesn’t speak to the Australian people honestly about the PRC and the urgent needs of our strategic circumstances.
This is nonetheless slated to be a happy six days in Shanghai, Beijing and Chengdu. Our new China policy seems to be: C’mon, baby, let the good times roll.
But when the good times end, the reckoning could be severe.
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