Liberals seek to regain lost Chinese voters at next election

The Coalition will target Chinese voters in key inner city seats with messages of their frugal economic management, tough stance on crime and support for entrepreneurship.

Peter Dutton at the Rowville Community Centre in Melbourne with members of the Knox Chinese Elderly Citizens Club. Picture: NewsWire / Nicki Connolly

You can now listen to The Australian's articles. Give us your feedback.

You can now listen to The Australian's articles. Give us your feedback.

You can now listen to The Australian's articles.

The Coalition will target Chinese voters in key inner city seats with messages of their frugal economic management, tough stance on crime and support for entrepreneurship in the hopes of winning back the diaspora that swung against the party at nearly double the rate of the national average in 2022.

The Australian can reveal the opposition intends to pour “significant effort and resources” into winning back hundreds of thousands of voters in Chinese communities, with Liberal MPs in key seats describing the “huge opportunity” the cohort presents for the party at the next election.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton — who has personally attended half a dozen engagements with Chinese communities this year — said traditional Liberal Party values were “resonating” with multicultural Australia because of the cost-of-living crisis and poorly-managed migration system, among other failings of the government.

“My message to communities across Australia, and to Chinese Australians and to other multicultural communities, is that there is a better way,” he told The Australian.

“Our multicultural character is one reason why we are the greatest country on earth, and critical to achieving that is a well-managed migration program — and we are not seeing that under this government.”

He said the Coalition would be presenting an alternate vision for government that would “turbocharge our small businesses”, while supporting families, community safety and those seeking to “having a go”.

“Australians are fast realising that they just can’t afford another three years of the Albanese government,” Mr Dutton said.

The Liberal Party suffered swings of nearly 7 per cent across the 15 seats with the highest proportion of people with Chinese ancestry at the last election, compared to its national average of just 3.7 per cent on a two-party-preferred basis.

But numerous Liberal sources said that, without Scott Morrison as leader and a reduction in the “clunky language” on China exercised under his government, they were optimistic the party would win back a significant portion of Chinese voters.

Liberal MP Keith Wolahan, whose Victorian seat of Menzies will have the biggest Chinese diaspora in the country after the redistribution in October, said he was focusing heavily on the cohort through in-person and online engagement, including on the emerging social media app described as China’s answer to Instagram, called the “Little Red Book”.

“If the Liberal Party is to earn the trust of metropolitan seats in Sydney and Melbourne, a key part of that is earning the trust of the Chinese diaspora, and we’ve been working very hard on that, certainly since the last election,” he said.

Liberal MP Keith Wolahan.

Other key seats with high Chinese populations that the Liberals will target include Tangey and Bennelong, selecting candidates with Chinese heritage for both seats.

Labor Tangney MP Sam Lim said his party had a desire to “bring people together, rather than seek division and conflict” – unlike the Coalition – which was one of its strongest selling points to the Chinese diaspora and other multicultural communities.

“The Chinese diaspora contribute so much to WA and Australia. I’m really proud to represent an area which has a much-higher than average population of Chinese heritage,” Mr Lim, who was born in Malaysia, said.

However, some Liberal sources said that while they hoped most Chinese voters would come back to the Coalition, it was “more realistic that we’ll probably only recover about half”.

A poll in Sydney Today, Australia’s biggest Chinese-language digital media outlet, found in July that 65 per cent of 600 respondents “definitely do not trust Dutton” because the Coalition’s aggressive behaviour at the last election.

Another 9 per cent said that they “want to believe him but they are still not convinced, so they would most likely still vote for Labor”.

Anthony Albanese told The Australian his engagement with Chinese Australian communities, which had spanned over decades, had always been “meaningful and constructive”.

“Importantly, it has been consistent,” he said in a veiled swipe at the Liberals for using language such as describing their Labor opponents as “Manchurian candidates” in February 2022.

“I have and always will be a champion of multiculturalism. Australia is proudly home to some 1.4 million people of Chinese ancestry … (who are) such an important part of our national story and our national identity,” the Prime Minister said.

Government sources also pointed to Labor’s win at the Aston by-election – a traditionally blue-ribbon seat with a higher-than-average Chinese population – as evidence the 2022 result was not a “one off” when it came to multicultural Australia deserting the Liberals.

Deputy director of the Australia-China Relations Institute, Wanning San, said while it was true Mr Dutton had “toned down his hawkish rhetoric on China and has mostly refrained from making gratuitous, provocative comments”, many Australian Chinese voters may still find it hard to take his words at face value.

However, she said that some traditional Liberal voters in various Chinese-Australian communities who swung to Labor in protest against the Coalition’s anti-China policy could decide to return to the Liberals because of the cost of living and the realisation that Labor’s China policy “does not seem very different from that of the Coalition, despite its calmer rhetoric”.