An improvement from Anthony Albanese on China from a low bar, but there is not much substance to this tour

Anthony Albanese meets with President Xi Jinping in Beijing on Tuesday. Picture: PMO

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Anthony Albanese’s Beijing press conference, following his meeting with Xi Jinping, was an improvement on his recent performances regarding the People’s Republic of China.

At least this time he was willing to mention some of the issues where Canberra disagrees with Beijing.

Of course, there’s not the slightest chance that anything Albanese says to Xi will affect Beijing’s behaviour.

The PM confirmed he had raised concerns about the PRC navy circumnavigating Australia in February and also engaging in live fire exercises in the Tasman Sea without notification, such that civilian passenger aircraft were forced to change their routes.

Xi told Albanese more or less that Beijing will do whatever it likes in terms of exercises.

Nonetheless, it was progress of a sort that Albanese was willing to mention it at all.

Quite misleadingly, Albanese claimed his position was just the same when the exercises took place in February. That’s not quite right. The government was notable in its apologia for Beijing’s actions back then.

Similarly, the PM raised the case of the Australian writer Yang Hengjun, who has been wrongly imprisoned in the PRC since 2019 on preposterous charges of spying.

The PM also reiterated Australia’s position on Taiwan, that we support the status quo on Taiwan and oppose any unilateral actions to change it. That means Australia opposes Beijing’s bullying and military intimidation of Taiwan, and certainly opposes the idea of Beijing taking direct military action against Taiwan.

It’s a good thing that the Australian PM stated that clearly, in a press conference, in Beijing. Nonetheless, there was, as ever, maddening vagueness and ambiguity about much that Albanese said.

China’s President Xi Jinping welcomes Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Picture: AAP

For example, Beijing officials and state owned media have been waging a campaign against Albanese’s decision to require the Chinese-owned company, Landbridge, to sell its long-term lease of the Port of Darwin.

They have also been campaigning for more liberal treatment of PRC investment in sensitive sectors in Australia.

Xi in his opening remarks stressed the importance of “equal treatment” of nations. Presumably that’s a dig at Australia’s foreign investment regime which distinguishes between potential investors who present strategic risk and those who don’t.

Of course, the PRC would never practice equal reciprocal treatment to Australia. Which port in mainland China, adjacent to sensitive military facilities, has a long-term lease owned by an Australian company?

Albanese announced before the federal election that his government would require Landbridge to sell the lease. There’s no sovereign risk here. The sale will occur at commercial prices. And if no corporate sale can be arranged, the Australian government should buy the lease at a price which means the company does not suffer a commercial disadvantage.

The national flags of Australia and China flutter in Tiananmen Square. Picture: Wang Xin/VCG

But Albanese then claimed that he’d had the same position on the Port of Darwin for 10 years. Certainly, nobody in Australia was aware of that. Nor did Albanese previously claim, until the last election, that there would be a forced sale.

Now that decision has been made, it should be proceeded with quickly.

Rightly, Albanese acknowledged that we have strategic competition in the region. But did he mean only strategic competition between the PRC and the US? Or is Australia part of that strategic competition as well, both as a close ally of the US and in our own right in the South Pacific? It would take code breaking skills of a high order to answer those questions from Australian ministerial statements.

Naturally, Albanese is completely unhelpful in trying to unravel what Richard Marles and Penny Wong mean when they say the chief worry about the Chinese military build-up is its lack of transparency. Questions aiming at this mystery provoked classic prime ministerial waffle.

The Prime Minister’s visit has been mostly symbol and not much substance, as is generally the case with high-profile visits to the PRC.

Anthony Albanese meets with China’s President Xi Jinping in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China. Picture: AAP

The high blown talk about so called “green steel” is more fantastic than the idea we’ll build nuclear submarines in Australia next decade, achieve free trade in APEC, abolish child poverty, or pay dividends for fourth and fifth places at all Australian race meetings.

Green hydrogen projects have been falling over left and right in Australia. They are unproven technology and not remotely economically competitive. The idea that with all our renewable energy we will make green steel which the PRC will pay a huge price premium for in order to satisfy the ambitions of reaching net-zero emissions by 2060 heaps fantasy upon conjecture, then mixes it with science fiction and political satire. It’s more likely that Superman will come to earth from Planet Krypton and play for the Socceroos.

Several decades ago there was a season of talking about how we were going to export huge amounts of elaborately transformed manufactures to Indonesia. I covered several Australian delegations in Indonesia where this was the talk of the day.

Nothing remotely like that ever came to pass and indeed now we have one of the smallest manufacturing sectors of any advanced economy.

Happy talk in foreign affairs often involves a good deal of high-minded nonsense. Much of that can be harmless, but it’s a sign, at best, that substance is missing.