This is the question which has been asked repeatedly by certain media outlets and by many members of the community. What is the Australian Government’s agenda with its confrontational stance on China? Clearly they feel this is the strategy to win the next election and to pander to a large number of Aussies who have a China bias.
Now this piece isn’t saying that the Chinese Government can’t and shouldn’t be held accountable for things such as human rights etc, but what we are seeing currently is an unfair target and focus on China, when Australia itself has serious human rights violations as does other major countries such as the US, Europe etc. Where is the focus on keeping them accountable?
The recent controversy is all the minor connections and insinuations the Australian Government is trying to make between Opposition leader Anthony Albanese and the Chinese Government. Liberal senators such as James Paterson have tried very hard to make these connections. His target was on Labor’s Richard Marles and going on about a trip Marles made to China in 2019.
FYI, it is very common for politicians to travel to other countries for political and educational exchanges, and as usual a lot of the accusations are pure conjecture without full proof evidence and facts.
In saying all this, I recently offered some comments to The New Daily about this issue and my point was that the anti Asian/Chinese racism in Australia has been normalised by the government rhetoric. In addition senior ministers such as Peter Dutton ( not just the PM ScoMo) are fueling the flames with their lazy and lacking nuance language, not caring that the racial backlash will impact on Asian/Chinese Australians. Here is some of what I said:
“When someone that high up – a senior minister – is using lazy language like that, what happens is there is going to be a racial backlash against people like myself who look Chinese.”
“They will be nice to the Asian or Chinese-Australian community when they need our votes,”
“But when we’re not needed, they’ll push us into a corner, or just throw us away.”
I will stop here as I could go on forever on this topic, and I would urge those reading this to have clarity when looking at this situation and know that there is a middle ground and we shouldn’t have to feel that we need to choose one side or the other.