Cafe Society: China critic Clive Hamilton says he won’t be ‘bullied into silence’

LEADING academic Clive Hamilton urges Tasmania to “wake up” to political influence from Beijing.

EVERYONE who starts researching and writing about the Chinese Communist Party’s internal influence operations in Australia has to do a periodic paranoia check, says well-known academic Clive Hamilton.

The author of Silent Invasion: China’s Influence in Australia says he was shocked, sometimes to the point of disbelief, by his research findings for his book.

“My fellow researchers and analysts would ring each other and say ‘You know, I think I’m getting paranoid, this can’t be happening’. And they’d say, ‘Clive, you are not paranoid, it is that bad’.”

I catch up with the honorary Tasmanian — he’s the first in four generations of his family to be raised outside the state — at MACq01 Hotel on the Hobart waterfront before his sold-out talk at the University of Tasmania on Tuesday.

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Some critics including political columnist and former Labor powerbroker Graham Richardson reckon Hamilton is indeed paranoid. Richardson has accused the Australia Institute founder and Professor of Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra of “yellow peril” fearmongering. Hamilton, he says, should “keep his mouth shut and his pen in his desk drawer”.

Hamilton doesn’t quite roll his eyes behind his silver-rimmed specs, but almost. He’s used to the flak, including the most predictable epithet.

“It’s hard to attack me as some reactionary old conservative who is probably a closet racist,” he says. “That’s just not my background and who I am.”

Nor, he is now convinced, is he paranoid. “I spent two decades engaged in the climate change debate, so I know about closed minds and denialism and I see exactly the same thing here from some people who simply refuse to open their minds to the evidence.”

He says many Chinese Australians share his concern about Beijing’s growing political influence. And let’s not forget, he says, that we are not dealing with a democracy but “a ruthless regime”. He says China is executing its global ambitions in a slow but highly strategic and multi-faceted rollout that can be difficult to discern at first.

Two years ago, he says, ignorance was a reasonable excuse for naivety. Not anymore. The level of naivety in Tasmania, he says, “is really something to behold”.

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Name-calling is not helping and misses the point. People who try to raise concerns “are howled down by both Government and Labor politicians”.

Silencers are playing directly into the hands of the Chinese Communist Party, which expects this kind of predictable outrage in response, he says.

“Accusations of racism and xenophobia are exploiting Australia’s shameful history of racism including anti-Chinese racism as a way of attempting to silence public debate that is raging on the mainland but which Tasmania’s political leaders do not want to be heard in the state.”

Tasmania can have a good, healthy, economically sustainable relationship with the People’s Republic of China, he says, “but it needs to go in with its eyes open”.

Author and academic Clive Hamilton warns about growing Chinese influence in Tasmania. Picture: LUKE BOWDEN

THE state needs to avoid developing a level of reliance on China for industries such as tourism and higher education that would make it vulnerable to political coercion.

While Tasmania is enjoying an economic boom, “let it not end in tears”.

Our Federal Government and security agencies are sounding the same warnings, and the introduction of foreign interference laws are also a significant flag, but Tasmania does not appear to be listening, he says.

Hamilton believes a concerted campaign is under way to extend the Chinese Communist Party’s influence here, partly through the creation and co-opting of various organisations to gain access and influence.

Our political leaders, he says, need to stop giving such organisations legitimacy by “inviting them into Parliament House to launch their new Communist Party front organisations”.

“In other parts of Australia, the Chinese Communist Party influence is now receiving much greater scrutiny and politicians are now being far more cautious about who they associate with…

“The Tasmanian Premier ought to be listening to the [national security] advice he is receiving from the highest levels in Canberra.”

As for shared scientific projects with China in Antarctica? Wake up, Tasmania, he says, the long-term Chinese interest in the southern continent is not as benign as our own.

A series of apparently targeted attacks including a home burglary on New Zealand academic Anne-Marie Brady this year after the professor published her findings on the Communist Party’s influence in New Zealand are unnerving to Hamilton.

And the criticism is wearing. But he says he has steeled himself.

“I thought ‘OK, will I be able to sleep at night if I have accumulated all this knowledge and am too afraid to put it into the public domain?’ What kind of person would I be if I were bullied into silence?”

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