‘Save your anger over war-crimes insult, ScoMo, China already owns us’

As a general rule, I never write about Australian political personalities. For I have found, over the years, that as soon as you do so, the readers immediately put on their team’s colours and start cheering or booing, and the little grey cells whose activation had driven you to put pen to paper in the first place, are simply thrown out the window.

But today, I have no choice, as our prime minister, Scott Morrison, has put himself in the frame; front, centre and back. So, one can hardly discuss our deteriorating relations with China without factoring in the role of Mr Morrison, an intervention which reached its apogee (or nadir, according to taste) last night, with his attack on a Chinese social media caricature of Australian war-crimes in Afghanistan.

For a prime minister of a middling power to go on public television, describe the caricature as “repugnant”, infer that it had the blessing of higher authority in Beijing and then demand an “apology” from China, was breathtaking.

China, it should be remembered, is our largest trading partner, it is the most powerful player in our region, it has spent a good decade actively trying to subvert our own domestic institutions, it is an authoritarian bully-boy in its own backyard, and it has an exceptionally thin skin. Yet, Mr Morrison demanded an apology from them. What on earth is going on?

I sat there, perplexed at the unfolding drama (because the stakes are now so high, you couldn’t call it anything banal, like melodrama). It was the classic staged set-piece of the 21st century – flags (many, not just one), lectern, sombre suit, flag lapel badge, even more sombre manner, yet he was purporting to take on China, the second-most powerful country in the world …. over a Twitter feed! Was it the Prime Minister of Australia, Scott Morrison MP, I was watching, or Scotty from Marketing, the arch-genius of the slick one-liner?

No-one seriously expects China to apologise, and they didn’t, piling on more pressure today as I write. And so, to have demanded such an apology of such an adversary, must have necessitated a higher level of judgement than I have. Surely, even Scotty could have figured that one out. So why did he do it?

Well, he’s not going to email me an answer, so I can only guess. And while I don’t profess to understand Scott Morrison, PM, I think I have a bit of a handle on Scotty from Marketing. My guess is that he was playing to his audience, his domestic audience that is, and he is a man always sensitive to that audience, especially that element which is part of his base.

So, in my opinion, he would be particularly sensitive to the ructions inside his base over the Brereton war-crimes inquiry forcing his hand, as it were. I believe he could not take the consequent sneering from Beijing over those war crimes without running the risk of seeming, to his disconcerted base, to be a fair-weather friend. Rather like Donald Trump.

But, like Trump, the ascendancy of Scotty from Marketing in the world of Scott Morrison PM, has dragged him into some serious flaws of judgement. We saw it in his initial refusal to return from Hawaii at the height of the bush-fire emergency; and we saw it again when he visited Cobargo and thrust out his hand for a photo-op with people who had just lost everything. And, after pulling up his bootstraps and acting like a prime minister during the coronavirus pandemic, he couldn’t resist having a swipe at those states governed by his opponents when the occasion presented itself.

And, worst, he allowed himself to be used as a tool by the toxic Trump administration to bait China over the origins of the pandemic, instead of murmuring: “Hey, Donald, why not do your dirty work yourself”. And here we find ourselves. Alone. Without true friends. In the eye of the Tiger. Ye gods, what a debacle!

Yet, it is one thing to berate the foolishness of the present government for the situation we find ourselves in with China. This situation has been growing for a generation when, instead of handling an emerging China carefully, we treated them like a milch-cow there to bail out our economy from the consequences of its inherent laziness. While choosing to ignore the inconvenient truth that China was in the game for its own advantage, not ours.

So, we let them monopolise great slabs of our export trade, instead of putting in the hard yards to safely diversify. With the result that our dependence resulted in such abominations as the rebuilding of the Steeler Stadium in Wollongong with Chinese steel, although the BlueScope blast-furnace was only 5 kilometres down the road.

We let them get their mitts on major strategic Australian assets, most notably the Port of Darwin, without a flicker of doubt. But worse, we handed the viability of our universities over to them, and then reacted with shocked bewilderment when the authoritarian government in Beijing started to interfere with life on our campuses which now housed hundreds of thousands of their own impressionable nationals.

Yet, when Clive Hamilton drew attention to the destruction of freedom of expression on our campuses, brought on by the activities of Chinese security wallopers, our spineless leaders chose to ban Hamilton’s 2018 book, Silent Invasion, from campus bookshops rather than confront foreign interference or the bean-counting mentality that caused this dependency. (I don’t think we have ever acted in a way likely to engender China’s ongoing respect.)

Many decades ago, I knew a very shrewd man called Charley Oliver, a trade union boss of the old, worldly school, who rather pithily told me once: “Son, never hand your executioner the axe”. That, I think, is what we have done with China. Beijing is not a citadel of democracy and free speech, and while they can’t be ignored and must be engaged with, to provoke them by demanding a world inquiry into their handling of a pandemic, and then to demand an apology from them, beggars belief.

That this was done to earn the favour of a will o’ the wisp like Trump, suggests a lack of judgement comparable with lolling on a beach in Honolulu while one’s country goes up in smoke. But worse, you can always come back from Honolulu and attempt to repair the damage. How Mr Morrison repairs this damage will require, in my opinion, some real leadership and substance, and not another piece of slick patter for the TV cameras.

At least we now have Joe Biden standing somewhere behind us.