James Campbell: Richard Marles’ real views on China revealed

With Labor Leader Anthony Albanese off the campaign trail, it should have been his deputy’s day in the sun but he is hamstrung by confused speeches on China, writes James Campbell.

Poor old Richard Marles. With his leader felled by Covid this should have been his time to shine. But instead of being front and centre of Labor’s campaign, until Saturday, his only public appearance had been on the Today Show.

The reason for the largely Marles-free airwaves of course is that Sharri Markson of The Australian has been digging around his utterances in the sphere of foreign affairs, particularly the tricky subject of China.

And what she has found is not good. Not good at all. In September 2019, two months before the last meeting between an Australian minister and their Chinese counterparts, the then shadow minister for Defence delivered a speech in Beijing.

As is usual when a Labor politician is addressing matters Chinese, it began with praise for Gough Whitlam’s visit to Beijing in 1971, while Australia still recognised Taiwan as the country’s government.

Deputy Labor Leader Richard Marles has been largely silent on the campaign trail. Picture: Tim Hunter

He then moved on to discuss the Morrison Government’s Pacific Step Up policy, which he said he supported, saying it was “critical” it was “founded on the right motives” going on to add “Australia does not have an exclusive right to engage with the Pacific” and the basis of our interest there “cannot be about attempting to engage in the strategic denial of others”. There are two things to be said about this.

The first is that could easily have been taken by his audience as an implied criticism of the motives of the Australian Government, which given the fraught nature of our two countries’ relationship at the time was a big no-no.

The other is that making it seem as though Labor was cool with China’s engagement in the region, he was in fact cutting across a real – if never publicly stated – reason for the existence of that policy.

Now to be fair to him, Marles may have known, as this audience certainly knew, that what he was saying was BS, and he just said it because he felt the diplomatic niceties required it.

Labor Leader Gough Whitlam (centre) during his first visit to China in July 1971. Picture: Whitlam Institue

But given what we already knew about the reality of Chinese engagement in the region – starting with the debt trap diplomacy and the bribery – he really would have done better to avoid the subject altogether.

You could also say, I suppose that this was back in 2019, before things got really bad between Australia and China.

But no such excuse applies to the book he published last year which makes it clear that not only did he mean what he said in 2019, he still thinks it today.

This effort – long on the need to tackle climate change if we are to be taken seriously – argued for Australia “establishing our motivations for taking action” which “must not be centred on denying China” because this “will be seen in a very cynical light”.

Not only that, Marles argued that: “Basing our actions in the Pacific on an attempt to strategically deny China would be a historic mistake.

Not only would this be detrimental to our regional relationships, it would be a failed course of action. Australia has no right to expect a set of exclusive relationships with Pacific nations. They are perfectly free to engage on whatever terms they choose with China or, for that matter, any other country.”

We could see Chinese military bases in the Pacific like this one in Africa. Picture: AFP

Besides, he added, “the idea that Australia would win a bidding war with China is laughable”.

Bizarrely, Marles thought that “rather than worrying about the prospect of foreign military bases in the region, our real call to arms must be the Pacific’s performance against the MDGs [Millennium Development Goals], and the associated and real risk that it will become entrenched as the least developed part of the world”.

Personally, I’d have thought the Pacific’s MDGs are largely a matter for them, whereas a Chinese military base nearby is a first order issue for the Australian Government and the idea we might soon have a defence minister who doesn’t think so is a bit of a worry. The best that can be said is he’s been consistent.

Back in 2018 Marles said China was rising “economically and in terms of its defence projection in our region. This is legitimate and in large measure we ought to embrace it”.

Richard Marles follows the foreign policy doctrine of Paul Keating. Picture:Justin Lloyd

Why, you might be asking, does Marles believe this stuff? And why is he prepared to say it in public?

The key to understanding this thinking lies in a couple of sentences later in the book. “Together,” he wrote” an assertive China and an unpredictable United States gave rise to the most challenging set of strategic circumstances Australia has faced since World War II,” later warning “there is a question mark over the future role of the US both in East Asia and globally”.

In other words there Marles is captured by what I call the Hugh White-Paul Keating doctrine, which can be summed up as the view that China’s sun is rising as America’s sets and that eventually Australia will have to trim its sails accordingly.

The alternative view, as enunciated by the Defence Minister Peter Dutton elsewhere in the paper today, is we ought to resist this as hard as possible.

The good thing is thanks to Marles’s admirable candour over many years, if you vote for him next month, you can’t pretend you don’t know what you’re getting.

Originally published as James Campbell: Richard Marles’ real views on China revealed