Albanese position on China discussion becoming untenable

Anthony Albanese greets Chinese President Xi Jinping at APEC in San Francisco last week. Picture: AFP

Anthony Albanese’s position on China is becoming untenable. It’s inconsistent, incoherent, self-contradictory and frankly a little ridiculous.

Either the Prime Minister did raise with Xi Jinping China’s shocking actions at sea that deliberately caused the injury of Australian navy personnel, or he didn’t. Albanese’s later comments on Sky TV criticising China look like a now typical government effort to clean up a prime ministerial mess.

Albanese will have to tell us whether he raised the matter with Xi or not. The Australian people have a perfect right to know this.

The Chinese government has now officially denounced Albanese’s latest critical comments on Australian TV.

There are only two possibilities on the Albanese/Xi encounter. Either the PM did not raise the naval issue with Xi, in which case the much ballyhooed new dialogue with Beijing is all but worthless, as we are apparently not allowed to raise issues where the Chinese military attacks our personnel.

Alternatively, Albanese did raise the naval incident with Xi, but is so scared of the Chinese president’s possible reaction that he won’t say so publicly.

If that is the case, the PM is extending a deference to Xi far beyond that extended to the pope, the late queen of England or indeed the US president.

Even where a discussion is broadly not for reporting, it is perfectly in order to list the things you raised with them even if, for the sake of confidentiality, you don’t detail how they replied. Albanese had already listed numerous things he and Xi did discuss in their informal but allegedly extended conversations at APEC.

The Albanese government has taken to making up
non-existent and preposterous protocol rules – we don’t say what we raised with foreign leaders, we don’t talk about domestic matters overseas, we don’t mention National Security Committee meetings of cabinet, no multiple-part questions at press conferences.

Similarly it is simultaneously disgraceful and, because so tawdry and obvious, politically ineffective that Canberra kept the Chinese naval incident secret until just after Albanese had finished his last APEC press conference. This is just about as cynical as you can get in manipulating information.

Because Albanese has not demonstrated great command of detail in a number of press conferences, the tactic now seems to be to try to limit the difficult questions he might face. This is the Joe Biden strategy writ small. It’s awful.

But there is a deeper, structural problem emerging in the government’s China policy.

Because the Albanese government has made stabilising relations with China a major priority of its foreign policy, and because it lavishes itself with praise for this stabilisation, citing it now as a major government achievement, it has tied itself in a straitjacket over China policy.

In reality, the stabilisation owes nothing to Australian diplomacy. As was widely forecast, including by this column, the Chinese were always at some stage going to call an end to the period of punishment they had subjected Australia to. They have done this with countless other nations, most notably Japan.

Beijing decided that its wolf-warrior diplomacy style had become counter-productive. Therefore it moved for its own reasons, at its own pace, to end Australia’s punishment period.

This has led to the gradual removal of a few trade barriers but no change to aggressive Chinese actions against Australia – military harassment as per the naval incident, massive cyber intrusion and intellectual property theft, continued political interference programs and the rest.

On the Australian side it’s led to hesitancy in diplomacy, a refusal to acknowledge Xi Jinping,in Biden’s words is a dictator, and determination that nothing should rock the boat of relationship, unless domestic politics absolutely demands it. This is proving to be poor politics, and remarkably feeble foreign policy.