Lib/Labs refuse to investigate our relationship with China – AGAIN. I would like to congratulate Liberal Concetta Fierravanti-Wells who crossed the floor to support the motion.
Transcript
[President]
Senator Roberts.
[Roberts]
Thank you, Mr. Acting Deputy President. As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I would like to say that One Nation is very supportive of the motion that Australia’s relations with the People’s Republic of China, be referred to the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee for inquiry and preparation of a report.
We wish to commend Senator Rex Patrick, for his seventh attempt to have this or a similar motion, sixth, I’m corrected, to have this motion progress. Mr. Acting Deputy President, Senator Patrick, I can only guess must feel like he’s on the set of Groundhog Day.
And on each of those occasions, Liberal and Labour Parties have joined to defeat all five of his previous attempts. I wonder because, if it’s because Liberal Andrew Robb, when he retired received an $880,000 salary after selling a lease to the Port of Darwin or after Sam Dastyari’s bills were paid by the Chinese or after Liberal Gladys Liu’s contradictions of fact about her associations with China that were never resolved or about Labor’s ICAC revelations in New South Wales.
We keep seeing Liberal and Labor come together to defeat even looking at this very vital, important relationship. It is imperative that Australia and China maintain a mutually respectful and beneficial bilateral relationship.
China is Australia’s largest two-way trading partner in exports and imports representing 24% of total trade with a value of $183 billion. That alone shows significant influence on Australia. Australia is China’s sixth largest trading partner and fifth biggest supplier of imports.
25% of Australia’s manufactured imports come from China. Thermal coal represents 13% of all Australian exports to China, and recently they tried to blackmail us about that. In more recent times, China has embarked on the One Belt One Road Initiative.
This is the Chinese government economic and strategic agenda where Eurasia, Africa and Oceania are more closely tied along two routes, one land, and one maritime. It is intended to facilitate Chinese economic and strategic domination of smaller countries along the routes, indeed Chinese control.
For Australia, we see the growing Chinese involvement in projects from Northern Australia, right through to Tassie, all providing little benefit to Australia, yet substantial benefits to China. We need to understand this relationship. We don’t just let them have an open door.
Other examples of Chinese involvement have been in the funding and support of local academic conferences and seminars. The negative aspects of the Confucius Institute are only just being realised as some universities remove them from their offerings.
Australia has been a destination of choice for many Chinese students to further their education in an Australian academic institution. It’s important to our economy. In 2018, there were more than 166,000 enrollments of Chinese students in Australia representing 43.3% of the total international student cohort heading for half.
A concern noted in some Australian universities is the potential dependence generated by full-fee paying international students on the overall money pool available to university budgets. Should those numbers suddenly diminish, it may leave some of our universities destitute and many university staff unpaid.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, these concerns have come to fruition and Australian universities are bleeding financially. To make matters worse, the Chinese government has just warned Chinese students not to study or return to study in Australia suggesting they would face discriminatory attacks.
Australia has been a favourite destination for Chinese tourists and this is shown again by recent numbers. More than 1.3 million Chinese tourists visited Australia last year, representing 15% of our total visitors. One seventh, this is a clear positive for Australia.
At the same time, there has been a growing boom of Australian tourists around 700,000 heading for China. This may also change rapidly as the Chinese government has recently warned off Chinese tourists from visiting our country through recent directives to their people.
One of the ongoing issues of concern relates to regional and global security. The growing tensions between the United States of America and the People’s Republic of China in terms of imposition of trade tariffs is placing Australia in a challenging position, given the importance of Australia’s relationships with both countries.
More recently, the Chinese government has imposed an 80% tariff on Australian barley without explanation, and refused to accept meat from four of Australia’s major meat abattoirs, again, causing concern to Australian producers.
These actions by the Chinese government appear to be in retaliation for being called on by Australia to allow an independent investigation into the cause of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan China, what I’ve referred to as the Chinese Communist Party and the UN virus.
How dare we want an independent investigation? The Chinese still denying being the source of the outbreak of the worldwide pandemic remain uncooperative in dealing with this just as Liberal and Labour remain uncooperative in dealing with any, any inquisition or any inquiry into our relationship with China.
The Chinese actions and or inactions likely indeed certainly made the pandemic far worse than it could’ve been. And their behaviour in China is responsible for the loss of tens of thousands of lives. Indeed, hundreds of thousands of lives.
The views taken of China’s growing military influence in the South China Sea remain of concern to our most important ally, United States of America and therefore, necessarily of concern to our country as an established ally of the US.
Regionally, China is having a growing influence by funding infrastructure projects for some of the Pacific Island countries, and our and very near neighbour, Papua and New Guinea, just over the horizon from Australia. This runs the risk of changing the whole dynamic between Australia and our near neighbours.
Given the potential for military and strategic use of these bases by China and the potential for resource extraction at some future time, there is need to consider this factor when examining our relationship with China.
We already feel this is at home with the outrageous decision to lease the Port of Darwin a strategic Northern gateway to China for 99 years. This is the home of our local naval presence. What on earth was the government thinking?
I point to Dutton, Mr. Dutton, Mr. Hastie, Senator Kitching who have raised valid concerns, both Liberal and Labor MPs and senators just as Senator Patrick mentioned.
Indeed it was reported, Mr. Dutton was reportedly stated as in 12th of October, 2019, one of the Morrison Government’s most senior figures has taken a direct swipe at Beijing accusing the Chinese Communist Party of behaving in ways that are inconsistent with Australian values.
The key points emerged, Mr. Dutton said that federal government would call out state actors if it was in the national interest. Well, let’s see an inquiry, Mr. Dutton said he wanted universities to be free from foreign interference. So let’s see an inquiry into that foreign interference that he acknowledges.
The Home Affairs minister, a very powerful minister, senior minister also criticised China’s Belt and Road Initiative and defended the ban on using Huawei to help build Australia’s 5G network. So it goes on to say in a newspaper article, “Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton warned Australia “would call out” quote “foreign and interference “in universities, as well as cyber hacks “and theft of intellectual property, “insisting it was the right thing to do.
“It represents,” the newspaper said, “some of the strongest language “yet from a federal government minister “on threat posed to China.” But we need more than language, we need more than inferences, we need an inquiry into the relationship.
The Chinese Communist Party behaves in ways that are inconsistent with Australian values and Western civilization. Recently in Queensland, my home state, a university student was suspended for daring to make pro-democracy statements about the suppression of students and demonstrators in Hong Kong by the Chinese government.
The University of Queensland appears now to be an agent of the Chinese government, which seems to have bought out an Australian university and is enabled by the university to oppress an Australian student for standing up for democracy.
And when I get to the point of quoting Clive Hamilton, then we know things are serious because Clive Hamilton to his credit has written a book calling out the issues that we have with China, raising serious threats and concerns to our country and our country’s security.
My issue, I must make clear is not with the marvellous Chinese people, including the amazing Chinese community we have here in Australia. We have the Chinese influence from North Queensland through the gold rushes in the 19th century, right through to the Southern parts and Western parts of our country.
And they made a marvellous contribution. My issue is with the Chinese Communist Party. The Communist Party of China and the policies that are inconsistent with our own values. And they have undue influence in Australian politics, values communities, and way of life.
Human rights is an area where China and Australia have vastly different views. Australia is the democracy and a signatory to many international agreements that preserve basic human rights. China is a Republic following a communist regime that is very rigid.
It is a controlling machine with little room to question the state and having limited rights for the individual. Watch the demonstrations for freedom happening in Hong Kong to see how that goes down? Many Australians remember the appalling and tragic events at Tiananmen Square where many people’s lives were sacrificed in the name of democracy.
A prime minister cried over that. And understandably so yet we can’t even have an inquiry into that relationship with China. Tiananmen Square was not merely an incident as recently reported in the media. It was one of the earliest signs in the West of this serial breaching of human rights and suppression of their own people in China.
The detention of those whose views differ from the regimes is a continuing disgrace and worthy of further review. The government and Labor have sold out Australia’s inheritance. No wonder they don’t want us to have a review of this catastrophic relationship, potentially catastrophic relationship.
Will the Liberal Party and the Labor Party will a Lib-Lab duopoly look beyond their Chinese donations to their parties and do the right thing by our country? These actions by China would appear to threaten the relationship of mutual respect between the two countries and are worthy of inquiry.
Actions of Lib-Lab MPs in governments handing control of essential services like electricity for goodness sake, our ports, our food producers to the Chinese Communist Party is insane. Why are we doing it? And why aren’t we bothering to look into it?
These deals threaten our honesty, fairness, and humanity, and our national security. One Nation supports the call for such an inquiry into a nation exerting powerful influences over our nation with potentially far more powerful influences on our nation’s future and on our people’s security. Thank you, Mr. Acting Deputy President.
