‘I won’t back down on Beijing’, says Peter Dutton

Peter Dutton says he won’t back away from his pre-election warnings about the dangers posed by China.

New Liberal Party leader Peter Dutton in Canberra on Monday. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Tracey Nearmy

Peter Dutton says he won’t back away from his pre-election warnings about the dangers posed by China, declaring the country under President Xi Jinping’s leadership “is the biggest issue our country will face in our lifetimes”.

The former defence minister campaigned heavily before the election on the security threats posed by China, and with Scott Morrison said deputy Labor leader Richard Marles was sympathetic towards Beijing.

The hawkish rhetoric cost the Coalition votes in seats with high numbers of Chinese speakers who flipped to Labor, including Chisholm in Victoria and NSW electorates of Reid and Bennelong.

Speaking after his elevation as Liberal leader on Monday, Mr Dutton said he did not resile from his comments on China “because I feel very passionately about this issue. I have had the benefit of the briefings in the National Security Committee and to be high-level in some circumstances as defence minister,” he said.

“The issue of China under President Xi is the biggest issue our country will face in our lifetimes. That’s the reality. That's the assessment of the American, British, Japanese and Indians and it’s our assessment as well.”

 He said he wanted Australia to have a productive relationship with China – which slapped $20bn in punitive tariffs on Australian exports and refused to engage with Australian ministers – but said resolving the rift was “an issue for China”.

Ahead of the election, Mr Dutton warned Australians that to preserve the peace, the nation needed to “prepare for war”.

He said on Monday the warning was “realistic”, given Beijing’s stated intent to take Taiwan.

“I'm concerned that if they went into Taiwan, that would change quite dramatically the ­security settings within our own region,” Mr Dutton said.

The warnings came amid criticism of the Coalition’s failure to head off a Chinese security agreement with Solomon Islands, and slow progress in delivering new capabilities to the Australian Defence Force.

Prior to the campaign, Mr Morrison was forced to apologise to parliament after branding Mr Marles a “Manchurian candidate”.

ASIO director-general Mike Burgess said at the time that the politicisation of national security had been “not helpful”.

After the campaign, Mr Burgess’s predecessor, Major General Duncan Lewis, also criticised the Coalition’s rhetoric on China, ­saying that it had been “rather louder than we should have been”.

“We’ve been in the forefront of some of the criticism of states such as China, when we might well have been better to have been one back and one wide,” he said.

The Australian reported during the election campaign that Mr Marles had met with Chinese diplomats 10 times over five years, and had given a draft speech to the Chinese embassy in Canberra before delivering it on a 2019 trip to China.

Mr Marles said after the election that the Coalition’s claims he was too close to China were “a ­pathetic attempt to distract from their own failings”.

“What we saw here was an ­attempt to politicise issues of nat­ional security, of strategic policy, to create difference where it didn’t exist,” he said.

“And the reason for that was ­really to distract from the former government’s failings, particularly in handling our relations within our own region, with Solomon Islands in the Pacific.”