Wooley: PM’s choice to walk the line between friends and enemies may not be wisest decision
Can Albanese court China while being engaged to the United States of America and avoid getting slapped in the face, asks Charles Wooley.
Opinion
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Early in Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s China trip some commentators were calling it “Gullible’s Travels”.
A cheap shot but inevitable given all the political credibility the PM had lost with his miscalculated referendum fiasco. We hoped that the ‘Adventures of Albo in the Chinese Lion’s Den’ would prove more considered and better advised.
A week later the journalistic appraisals were that politically it has been good for the government because China changed the subject. The referendum had receded into an awkward and, for too many Australians, a tiresome memory.
And that’s the last time I will even mention it except to note that in China, such discordant historical episodes, like the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre of protesting students, are erased from history, along with whatever really happened more recently in Wuhan.
Albo may have taken advice on the techniques of political amnesia during his China visit.
Things already forgotten at home are the PM’s recent close relations with Qantas’s Mr Joyce (who?) and the PM’s son’s membership of the Chairman’s Lounge (what?).
Climate change must also be overlooked as we continue to be what the PM calls “a reliable supplier of energy to the world,” while half-heartedly attempting to give up the dangerous fossil fuel addiction in Australia.
As for the looming interest rate disaster back home. The housing crisis. Power prices. The travelling journos looked churlish even raising such domestic bagatelle when Albo was so busy on the international stage.
What the Chinese most want from us is iron ore and the coal and gas needed to convert it to steel for domestic and military purposes.
To make it sweet, Peking will happily remove those failed and bullying tariffs imposed on our barley, lobsters and wine.
Farmers, fishermen and wine growers, who would never vote Labor in a fit, are happy. But this year, for ordinary punters there will be no Santa Claus. With the prospect of paying $150 a kilo for a lobster along with an expected price rise for Australian wine, most people might be drinking beer and eating prawns this Christmas.
There is a bigger political shift to be considered. At the higher end of indulgence, the inner-city tipplers and gourmets have probably already gone Teal and are lost to both parties. While in the mining regions blue-collar workers are now self-employed contractors with their own company structures and are less inclined to vote Labor.
The ALP has known for some time that the electorate is changing and drifting. Their best bet, given Labor’s much stronger front bench, is to present themselves conservatively as the natural and most capable party of government. Engaging as they have done in recent weeks with the world and with our region is one way of projecting a semblance of adroit leadership.
The hazard here for Albo the suitor, is how to court China while being engaged to America and to do it without getting slapped in the face for offending both of them.
I can’t think how you cogently explain to either that we are buying American nuclear submarines to protect us from the burgeoning Chinese Navy (Mr Xi’s proclaimed “Wall of Steel”) at the same time as we are selling China all the coal and iron ore needed to build those ships.
Are the Yanks desperate enough for our friendship to buy that?
Even Australians, if they thought about it, might need some convincing that we need the money from China to pay the $368bn bill to protect us from China. But on the other hand, in this land we have always grudgingly accepted the old truth that “bullshit baffles brains”.
Still, we can all recognise bullshit when we see it.
To work this deceit in the bigger world Albo will need to be much more credible abroad than he has so far proven at home.
You wouldn’t be surprised if the Chinese Communist Party is still shaking its collective head in the wake of Albo’s deeply enigmatic visit. “He brings wine and lobster. He wants to be our friend, but his best friend is our worst enemy?”
And the Americans too must be wondering if they can trust Australia with Virginia Class nuclear-submarine technology when we are getting so close and comfy with a nation which challenges their assumed primacy in the world.
“Is he the Manchurian Candidate? Whose side is he on? Can we really trust a lobster salesman with our biggest secrets?”
It’s quite possible that neither China nor America can really understand the Australian way of thinking. Are we presenting as a diplomatic bridge between East and West? A mediator in a divided world?
Or is it that superficially we hope to appear profound but deep down we are shallow?
Albo wants to negotiate as much money as he can get from totalitarian China and as much protection as he can get from democratic America. A kind of two-way toadying which is probably what many Australian business interests want too as the economic future becomes increasingly uncertain.
It is salutary to note that before Albo met Xi Jinping, Joe Biden warned against fully trusting the Chinese. It was the gentlest of admonishments, “Trust but verify,” the President cautioned. It was half a thought. We were waiting for a clarification that never came. But in essence that’s the problem with Joe and why the spectre of Donald Trump is now looming over Australia’s dangerous liaisons.
A second-term President Trump will prove an idiosyncratic ally. He is a cantankerous New York gutter-fighter who will demand total loyalty. He is the complete political gangster in a culture where an each-way compromised capo like Albo might be found in concrete boots at the bottom of the sea.
That’s fair enough, you might think, that politicians perish on their compromises. What’s not fair is that the rest of us might go down as well.
But that’s history folks.
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain got it monumentally wrong in 1938.
Eighty-five years later, has “Peace in our time” now become “Lobsters in our time”?
Unhappily this might be the only way the present rhymes with the past.
Because scanning the ranks of today’s Australian federal parliament there is no sign of a Winston Churchill.
Charles Wooley is a Tasmanian-based journalist.
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