Nothing could better illustrate what’s wrong with Premier Daniel Andrews’s political culture than his bizarre statement that it was up to Scott Morrison to provide a list of alternative markets and trading arrangements for Victoria because it appears likely that under new legislation the Belt and Road Initiative deal Andrews did with Beijing will be scrapped by the federal government.
The foreign affairs power has often enough been misused in Australia constitutionally to centralise control in Canberra in areas that rightly belong to the states. But foreign affairs truly belongs to Canberra. The nation only has one government foreign policy at a time. As the Prime Minister said, there is only one sovereignty here — Australian sovereignty.
Andrews was way out of his depth, beyond his own expertise and with no formal government department that could properly advise him, when he negotiated his BRI with Beijing in 2018.
Chinese negotiators eat unsophisticated provincial panjandrums for lunch every day of the week.
Canberra had decided to welcome Chinese investment in principle but not to sign up formally to a BRI deal because it was the assessment of all relevant federal agencies that the BRI was a geostrategic play by Beijing to gain influence, especially in Third World countries.
The Andrews government undertook the most fleeting of consultations with the federal government, involving no detailed work with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, before signing a secret BRI deal.
Victoria got nothing concrete from the deal but gave Beijing two political victories: it could boast about another Western government supporting the BRI, and portray Australian policy as divided and confused.
Andrews put provincial grandstanding, the implications of which his government plainly did not understand, above the national interest.
Federal Labor supports the new foreign relations legislation, which will likely render the BRI agreement obsolete.
Victoria will lose exactly zero dollars of trade from the Morrison government’s move, unless Andrews’s Beijing friends make a special example of him.
Such state-based grandstanding in opposition to Australian foreign policy is what makes the federal legislation necessary.
Less gesture, more competent delivery: that’s what state governments should do.
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