Australia's Opposition Overtly Cozying Up To China

The party's review of its election performance, undertaken by former party director Brian Loughnane and frontbencher Jane Hume, said:“In the top 15 seats by Chinese ancestry the swing against the Party (on a 2PP basis) was 6.6%, compared to 3.7% in other seats. There are more than 1.2 million people of Chinese heritage living in Australia today. Rebuilding the Party's relationship with the Chinese community must be a priority during this term of Parliament.”

Marginal Labor seats that are targets for the Liberals, where the Chinese vote is significant, include Reid and Bennelong in NSW and Chisholm and Aston in Victoria. Dutton (and the PM) will attend a Lunar New Year celebration in Box Hill in Melbourne this weekend.

It's notable that David Coleman, named by Dutton last weekend as the opposition's new spokesman on foreign affairs, has worked extensively with the Chinese community.

One of the contenders for the post was the high-performing James Paterson. There may have been stronger arguments for keeping Paterson in home affairs, but his very hawkish stand on China might have been in the mix.

Talking up the positive side of the Coalition's record on China, Dutton harked back to the signing of the free trade agreement under the Abbott government, and said“we want there to be mutual respect in the relationship”.

Over its years in government, the Coalition's relationship with China has varied between pragmatic friendship and suspicious negativity. After relatively smooth sailing in the Abbott period, things soured when the Turnbull government called China out over foreign interference, introduced legislation and banned Huawei from the 5G network.

Then, relations plunged dramatically when the Morrison government demanded an inquiry into the origins and handling of the outbreak of Covid in Wuhan.

Despite Dutton's confidence, it's more than possible that managing the China relationship after the election could be trickier than it has been during this one, no matter who is in power.

The Albanese government can claim the greatly improved bilateral relationship as one of its major foreign policy achievements. China has brought Australia out of the deep freeze, lifting the A$20 billion (US$12.4 billion) worth of trade barriers it had imposed. Dialogue and ministerial exchanges have resumed. Albanese has been welcomed in China.

But this week's speculation relating to the new Chinese artificial intelligence platform DeepSeek is just the latest reminder of perennial security suspicions about the penetration of Chinese technology.

(Incidentally, Dutton has an account on the Chinese-owned TikTok – despite it being banned from official government devices – in part to engage with the local Chinese community, as well as with younger people generally.)

Australia's minerals industry is potentially vulnerable to Chinese displeasure. The Senate, in the next fortnight, will consider the government's Future Made in Australia legislation, which provides a tax incentive for processing critical minerals.

The Chinese have a global stranglehold on this processing – and have shown a willingness to weaponize it, for example against Japan. China's multi-billion dollar funding of nickel processing in Indonesia has had a dire impact on producers here in Australia.

The change of government in Australia certainly facilitated the improvement in the bilateral relationship, but that improvement was also strongly driven by China's own interests. Similarly, the future of the relationship is more in China's hands than in Australia's.

China expert Richard McGregor, from the Lowy Institute, says:“ Relations with China are inherently volatile. The day-by-day relationships have returned to a degree of normality. But all of the structural stresses which created antagonism are still there.”

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These include China's“military assertiveness in the region, competition between the US and China, Australia's concern about foreign interference and hacking, China's efforts to build their power in the Pacific at the expense of Australia. None of that has gone away,” McGregor says. The single biggest change of recent years“is that“China has become much more powerful and is far more willing to throw its weight around.”

Separate to any hiccups in the bilateral relationship, Australia could find itself caught in the crossfire if there is a serious deterioration in the US-China relationship under Donald Trump – notably if his tariff policy leads to a trade war. Simon Jackman, from the University of Sydney, warns that if US policy hit the (already struggling) Chinese economy, that would affect Australian exporters.

“US tariffs or import bans that slowed China's economy would cause some short to medium headaches for Australian exporters,” Jackman says.“As in Trump Mark 1 and Covid, Australian export industries would find themselves looking for opportunities elsewhere, if global supply chains had to re-equilibrate in response to an upheaval in the US-China trade relationship.”

Ironically, the earlier search for diversified markets when the Chinese imposed their restrictions on Australian producers would have helped prepare exporters for such a contingency.

Michelle Grattan is professorial fellow, University of Canberra

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

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