The Chinese Communist Party’s campaign zou chu qa—go global—has made the Australian nation its major target by taking a large and growing chunk of its economy.
When the Americans and Europeans blocked Chinese attempts to acquire major stakes in their resource companies and other strategic industries, China saw Australia’s permissive foreign investment rules as an open door to the country’s assets.
Last year, half of China’s offshore investment of $65 billion was spent on Australia’s assets. Earlier this year, the Chinese communists were reportedly pumping $500 million each week into Australian government securities.
The Chinese are buying coal, iron ore, various metals, LNG gas, uranium, and swathes of residential property in Sydney and Melbourne.
A vast array of China lobbyists fuelling this business in Australia includes dealmakers, politicians, journalists, academics, think tank outfits, and seminars galore.
“I’ve never seen anything like it—the sheer weight of the Chinese focus on Australia,” said Robin Chambers, a Melbourne lawyer involved in China investment for 28 years.
The chairman of the federal parliament’s foreign affairs subcommittee, Michael Danby, counsels caution in business dealings with the Chinese.
“Now, it is many in academe or those promoting business who suffer most from illusions about China. Beguiled by the prospect of profit in the vast Chinese market, they have persuaded themselves that China is a normal country. China is not a normal country,” he wrote in The Australian.
“This is a one-party state ruled by the Communist Party. … The party also rules business life directly through state-owned enterprises and indirectly through a web of influence that extends into every supposedly privately owned company.”
Writing before China’s state-owned Chinalco lost a bid for a $23 billion stake in Rio Tinto, financial journalist, Robert Gottliebsen said, “In a decade or two China may emerge as our ‘protector’ … taking the role that Britain and the U.S. took.”
And after the Chinalco bid failed, “We can now see how important that Rio Tinto was to China’s plan to control the global resources chain.”
When speaking to journalists about his recent trip to China, Premier of Western Australia (WA) Colin Barnett sounded so enthusiastic about business prospects that News Limited reporter Michael Sainsbury quipped, “In fact at times you got the feeling that he would support a 100 percent takeover of WA by China at the right price.”
This month the Australian deputy consul in Guangzhou, Jeff Turner, called for more Chinese investment in Australian energy and resources sectors, and predicted the two countries would become more integrated in the next five to ten years.
To suggest integration is pure madness for a hundred reasons, especially when the Chinese regime runs a totalitarian one-party police state diametrically opposed to the core values of the Australian people in respect of universal human rights, democracy, and personal freedom.
Many people would question The Australian newspaper’s mantra “Australia needs foreign investment” propagated almost daily, and embarrassingly so by its columnist, Glenda Korporaal who continued, “Despite a bout of near-hysteria over Chinese investment in Australia earlier this year concerning the proposed Chinalco investment in Rio Tinto-stirred up, one suspects, by various interest groups for their own purposes.”
Earlier, the paper’s own Newspoll showed six out of ten Australians said the federal government should block China’s state-owned Chinalco’s bid to increase its stake in Rio Tinto!
Sell the Milk, Not the Cow
Australia’s over reliance on foreign investment amounts to selling off the farm.
When you can drive an army through Australia’s permissive foreign investment rules, a majority of a Senate Economics Committee has blocked attempts to tighten the loose rules.
Three dissenting lawmakers Sens. Barnaby Joyce, Nick Xenophon, and Scott Ludlam demanded that Australia’s integrity must never be compromised by a commercial imperative.” Their point was, “You sell the milk, not the cow, and you sell the minerals, not the mine.”
Like the Europeans, Australia should publicly declare a far wider range of strategic industries in which foreign investment is limited or prohibited, and then Australia can trade with China and others—but on Australia’s terms.
A growing appetite for energy and mineral resources will bring fierce competition for the security of supply from China and other nuclear-armed countries.
This thinking is expressed in a recent unpublished essay from Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, parts of which were published in The Weekend Australian.
“China is significantly expanding its military. China is leveraging its foreign policy influence, and at times in a direction with which we have not agreed—for example in Darfur, Zimbabwe and Burma.
“China is deploying its considerable financial power to purchase assets that secure its long-term economic interests—most particularly in energy and resource security—sometimes rubbing up against the interests of other states.
“Similarly China’s continuing record on human rights puts it at odds with the West and the Universal Declaration.
“The U.S., its friends and allies must therefore remain vigilant against the possibilities of alternative contingencies should China choose alternative paths for its future.”
Frank Lee is a former editor of The Clerk, the national journal of the Federated Clerk’s Union.
