The Chinese survey ship now navigating Australia’s southern coastline is a pointed reminder that Canberra’s “co-operate where we can, disagree where we must” approach to stabilising relations with Beijing is no defence against the sort of treatment our nearest neighbours have suffered for years.
For a broad hint as to what China had planned for Australian waters, successive federal governments need only have looked to our closest neighbours and the ongoing intimidation faced from Chinese grey hulls surveying their waters.
Someone in Canberra must have noticed the intermittent geopolitical stoushes over more than a decade whipped up on our maritime borders by Chinese survey vessels lingering in Indonesia’s Natuna waters on the edge of the South China Sea, in Malaysia and Vietnam?
Surely nobody needs reminding of Beijing’s escalating torment and harassment of The Philippines, America’s most loyal Asian ally and an Australian defence treaty partner?
Last September Malaysia, a country whose preferred response to regular Chinese maritime harassment is to pretend it isn’t happening, went to the trouble of sending a patrol ship to shadow the Ke Xue San Hao Chinese research vessel conducting unauthorised surveys at Ardasier Bank, 278km from Kota Kinabalu.
Chinese survey and coast guard vessels have been such a constant irritant in Indonesia’s Natuna waters in the south of the South China Sea that former Indonesian president Joko Widodo twice dusted off his bomber jacket to reinforce his country’s sovereignty on the deck of an Indonesian naval vessel.
Within days of his successor Prabowo Subianto’s inauguration last October, Indonesia’s Bakamla coast guard publicly released a video showing the latest confrontation with a China Coast Guard vessel that – like a bad penny – kept returning to the Natunas to harass oil and gas surveying vessels despite being chased off by Indonesian navy ships.
Last June, Hanoi publicly demanded China’s Hai Yang 26 vessel end its “illegal survey activities” within Vietnam’s exclusive economic zone and continental shelf.
“Vietnam also demands that China not repeat such illegal activities, fully respect Vietnam’s sovereign rights and jurisdiction, respect international law and adhere to UNCLOS (UN Convention on the Law of the Sea) 1982,” the foreign ministry thundered.
Compare that with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s quiet regret this week at the incursion of a Chinese survey vessel off the South Australian coast.
“I would prefer that it wasn’t there,” he said of the Tan Suo Yi Hao survey vessel now making its way along the South Australian coast near submarine cables critical to Australia’s communications lines.
“But we live in circumstances where, just as Australia has vessels in the South China Sea and vessels in the Taiwan Strait and a range of areas, this vessel is there.”
It took opposition defence spokesman Andrew Hastie to point out the “false equivalence” of a Chinese vessel potentially surveying Australia’s territorial waters and Australian navy ships participating in freedom of navigation exercises in contested international waters.
That Australia should now be getting the “Southeast Asia treatment” from our biggest trading partner should come as no surprise, given the precedent it has set in our region.
What is more surprising is that the government appears to have been caught so flat-footed by it.
Did we think we would be exempt?
Just what the Tan Suo Yi Hao vessel, equipped with a submersible capable of scanning the seabed, is doing in Australian waters is still up for conjecture, given it has just completed an authorised 45-day joint survey of southern New Zealand waters.
That will be better understood in coming days, when it either heads for home or takes a right turn into the Indian Ocean off the West Australian coast.
But Australia should be in no doubt that China is sending an unambiguous message with its live-fire exercises off the east coast and warship circumnavigation last month, and this latest incursion by a vessel which – as with almost all such ships – is likely equipped for dual civilian and military purpose.
As it has done for years in our neighbourhood, Beijing appears to be normalising intimidatory behaviour in Australian waters.
Like the proverbial slow-boiling frog, Canberra can either call it out now or risk a steady escalation in coming months and years.
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