Labor would be ‘more hawkish’ against Beijing’s militarisation

‘I think we need a very robust position in respect of the South China Sea,’ says Labor defence spokesman Richard Marles.

Richard Marles at The Australian’s Strategic Forum in Sydney on Monday. Picture: Nikki Short

A Labor government will be “more hawkish” than Scott Morrison in pushing back against Chinese militarisation of the South China Sea, Labor defence spokesman Richard Marles said on Monday.

Speaking at The Australian’s Strategic Forum on China in Sydney on Monday, Mr Marles hit out at what he said was the lack of ­bipartisanship on Australian foreign policy on China.

But he initially declined to give details on the different actions Labor would take or whether he would approve freedom of navigation operations, saying it was “difficult to articulate this from opposition because you don’t have all the operational detail that you do in government”.

In a lively panel discussion, former ASIO chief Dennis Richardson challenged Mr Marles’ criticisms. “I will just ask one question, your party assumed it was going to win the election . . . given that you did a lot of planning for that presumably you had already thought through what your guiding philosophy and grand plan would be,’’ Mr Richardson said. “So would you like to outline what it was?”

Mr Marles joked: “You’ve got a career as a journalist coming up”, before saying Labor would have sought more good will, better diplomacy and an overriding architecture.

“It means walking down a path that is actively building trust knowing that, if we are going to be doing business with China, there needs to be a dimension of trust to it,” Mr Marles said.”There have to be some relationships at a political level between senior politicians in Australia and senior politicians in Beijing. Right now I don’t think there is a single one of those relationships which exist.”

Mr Richardson, a former secretary of the departments of foreign affairs and defence, said the answer showed Labor’s plan was no different from the Coalition’s.

“If you guys get into office in the next election, within two years of the next election you will no more have a guiding philosophy, you will no more have a grand plan than what we have at the moment because grand plans don’t exist in the real world,” he said.

“If the political parties wanted to do something positive they could both, on both sides of the aisle, resist the temptation to make political capital out of missteps by the other when it might come to China.”

Mr Marles called on the government to show greater leadership in its handling of the frequently difficult relationship with China, saying there was a need for some sort of formal “architecture” to reconcile the trade and security tensions inherent in the China ­relationship.

“It has to be a joint discussion and there has to be some kind of framework, architecture, which ­allows that discussion to take place,” he said. “The one thing you can say is that the government of the day has to lead it. We intended to do that. But right now we’ve been, you know, crying out for the government to try and lead a conversation like that.”

Mr Marles suggested a future Labor government would harden the line on key elements, particularly the South China Sea, which Beijing has fortified with a series of military installations in defiance of international law. “I think we need a very robust position in respect of the South China Sea,” he said. “And in terms of my advocacy for that, it would have been … on a more hawkish end than what we’ve seen from the government.”