Whatever else you might think of him, Tony Abbott has a lot of chutzpah.
Australia’s worst prime minister, a leader so awful he couldn’t even make it two years into his prime ministership before his colleagues turfed him out, the “good government starts today” bloke who notoriously struggled to defeat an empty chair, the former PM who lost his own seat so badly it looks permanently gone from the Liberal column… has an awful lot to say on public policy.
And he’s particularly verbose about China — or “communist China”, as Abbott calls it. In a podcast recently with some zygote from the Institute of Public Affairs, Abbott savaged Anthony Albanese for travelling to Beijing without meeting “the leader of the free world, Donald Trump”. Albanese’s visit to Beijing was a sign of a reluctance to “take on” China, Abbott claimed, and a sign that we were renewing our interest in great economic involvement with China, “rather than reduce it … the more exposed we are to China, the more vulnerable we are” to weaponisation of trade. “We should be diversifying our trade,” Abbott insisted. “The wrong trip at the wrong time to the wrong place.”
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Abbott’s hypocrisy on this was so extraordinary that even the toddler speaking with him pointed out he’d negotiated a free trade agreement with China when he was briefly prime minister. Abbott defended himself by saying it was possible to see that China was on a liberalising path a decade ago. Abbott has been peddling this line for a long time: hilariously, he lauded Xi Jinping for Xi’s commitment to full democracy after he allowed the Chinese leader to speak in Parliament House in 2014.
Alas, it’s nonsense. China’s oppression of the Uyghurs was already well-known by that point, including its sentencing of academics to prison for crimes such as “separatism“. The Xi regime’s treatment of dissidents was notorious. China was already building islands in the South China Sea to advance its regional claims in 2014, and Abbott’s own foreign minister Julie Bishop was rudely rebuked by her Chinese counterpart for daring to mention the issue.
The idea that Abbott can now plausibly claim to be shocked, shocked that Xi turned out to be anti-democratic and aggressive is garbage. He knew what Xi was like then but he charged ahead and not merely signed a “free” trade agreement (which included a sovereignty-abrogating investor-state dispute settlement clause aimed at preventing Australian governments from making policy changes that inconvenienced Chinese companies) and demonised anyone who criticised it as racist, but went further and actively undermined Australian sovereignty. He did that by promising Xi he would progress an extradition treaty that the Howard government had agreed with China before it lost office. Once he lost the prime ministership and it was left to Malcolm Turnbull to implement Abbott’s promise to Xi, Tony decided in fact he’d opposed the extradition treaty all along.
Abbott’s posturing as the diehard enemy of Chinese tyranny is thus rather hard to swallow. It’s also amusing to watch the Institute of Public Affairs toddlers playing dress-ups in the Sinophobic clothes of their elders, given the IPA was right behind that dud “free” trade agreement that turned out not to be worth the paper it was written on.
The performative railing at China of Abbott’s erstwhile chief of staff Peta Credlin is also amusing: she has lashed Albanese over and over again for daring to visit China, accusing the prime minister of turning Australia into the Switzerland of the Pacific.
Credlin, like her boss, didn’t seem quite so worried about China when she was Abbott’s chief of staff, thrashing out a free trade agreement, inviting Xi to address Parliament, approving a parliamentary strategy of attacking FTA critics as racist, and surrendering Australian sovereignty by agreeing an extradition treaty with a country with a 99%+ prosecution success rate.
It’s somewhat unfair to single out Credlin given she’s only one, and not even remotely the most rabid, of the News Corp commentators now shrieking hysterically about the imminent Chinese takeover of Australia. But 10 years ago, it was News Corp that was in the vanguard of wanting to sell out Australia to China.
Who can forget the Great Bloviator, Paul Kelly, sounding like he was writing for the Global Times in his swooning praise of Xi when he addressed parliament:
The gift China can offer other nations is access to the biggest growing market on earth and that gift has been extended to Australia on a privileged basis … Xi focused exclusively on the glorious future. He predicted the China-Australia partnership would span ‘mountains and oceans’ in an everlasting capacity. Its dual foundations were the formal strategic partnership and the new FTA … the sheer dynamic driving the complementary Australia-China partnership. This mutual self-interest is going to pull Australia far closer into China’s orbit in coming years. And this process is being authorised by a pro-US conservative, Tony Abbott.
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Or there was that noted smiter of tyrants, Greg Sheridan, who attacked the union movement’s “truly disgraceful and xenophobic campaign” against the free trade agreement and claimed “Labor is committing shocking vandalism against our national interests” by questioning it.
And by the way, let’s not forget Michaelia Cash, who was caught out wildly exaggerating the benefits of the FTA with China a decade ago. As shadow foreign affairs spokesperson, Cash has joined the conga line of Coalition critics of Albanese’s trip to China. That conga line includes defence spokesman Angus Taylor, who after committing the Coalition to war with China in his 7.30 appearance last week, had to undertake a humiliating interview with Sky News on Friday to row back and insist he hadn’t changed position on Taiwan.
Taylor shouldn’t worry too much. Changing position on China is routine in the Coalition and its propaganda arm at News Corp — as is pretending that they’d never had any other position.
Do you support Albanese’s China strategy, or does Tony Abbott have a point?
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