China Has Stripped Us Bare

China Has Stripped Us Bare
People pass signs for a COVID-19 Clinic as they enter or exit St Vincent's hospital in Sydney, Australia, on March 18, 2020. (Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images)
David Flint
3/24/2020
Updated:
3/26/2020
Commentary

No one should have been surprised by the Wuhan virus, according to the respected research group, EcoHealth Alliance.

As argued here (21/3), the blame for playing down earlier pandemics lies with the U.S. mainstream media, who cynically tailor their reporting for blatant political purposes. EcoHealth attributes increases in the number of pandemics, taking over 300,000 lives since 2001, to massive increases in urbanisation, international travel and chicken and pig consumption as well as those sickening ‘wet markets.’

The incidence of pandemics, they ominously warn, will only increase exponentially. Just on increased urbanisation, Australia’s politicians are committed to bringing in 100,000 immigrants every quarter, provided none is a persecuted white South African farmer.

Most go to the eastern seaboard capitals, all bursting beyond their infrastructure. The politicians do this, not as the constitution insists, for the ‘peace, order and good government’ of Australia. They do it so that this will produce GDP statistics which justify the fake claim that we haven’t had a recession for years.

The fact is that even in the unlikely event that the Beijing communists were to behave properly, we would still have some pandemics. And the U.S. media has lost the power to suppress news about them, even if a Democrat were in the White House.

So what is done to fight the Wuhan virus now will be seen as a precedent.

The effectiveness of the Trump model will be clouded by a media still outraged by his being president and the likelihood he will win against an apparently senile opponent with an unimpressive record and allegations of family corruption. This reluctance to credit Trump for his response to Wuhan extends beyond the United States. For example, Trump has been unjustifiably described in the Australian as being ‘missing in action’ (Paul Kelly) and ‘badly mishandling the crisis’ (Greg Sheridan).

Surfers Paradise is seen empty in Various Cities, Australia, on March 24, 2020. (Chris Hyde/Getty Images)
Surfers Paradise is seen empty in Various Cities, Australia, on March 24, 2020. (Chris Hyde/Getty Images)

The key to the Trump response is to immediately restrict travel from the source, even if it means standing up to China which no President has previously done. Followed the next day by Australia, the result was every tin-pot politician in the West was eventually determined to be seen to be similarly strong, even in areas where Trump was much more versatile, such as social distancing.

Thus while Australian authorities have displayed extraordinary negligence over the entry of cruise liner passengers and in not acting against the devious evasion of bans by some universities, they did what even the threat of Japanese invasion did not, they closed Sydney’s beaches.

This demonstrates one thing: except for staged photo opportunities, politicians never experience the forced proximity of peak-hour public transport.

Apart from immediate travel bans, the Trump model involves federal assistance and something he was obviously working on even as he was being impeached, a truly impressive public-private partnership. On the basis that patients can become infected in hospital, one innovation is to put testing in unlikely places with drive-through labs, some even in supermarket carparks.

Despite their propaganda, the communists are entirely to blame for the crisis. Yet their counter-propaganda goes around the world, found recently in a large supplement in the Sydney Morning Herald. This propaganda is not only repeated by some journalists, but politicians who should know better also foolishly lend credibility to Beijing’s claims about overcoming their virus.

These have been thoroughly exposed in the columns of the Epoch Times, which points out that the closing by China of 21 million of their mobile phone accounts suggests a far higher death toll. They say that the virus should be renamed ‘CCP’, the ‘Communist Party of China’.

This raises a related issue, the massive sell-off of premium Australian assets to corporations under the control and direction of the Beijing communists. On this, a significant number of the political class have shamefully profited from promoting this divesting of our children’s heritage. Some even call for us to wind down the U.S. alliance. The result of that would be that we would eventually become a Beijing satellite.

Australia would be different from most satellites which are either appalling dictatorships like Zimbabwe and Venezuela, or those who could not repay loans described as aid. Australia would be a coup for Beijing in its plan to be the world’s dominant power by 2049, the first English-speaking democracy to be reduced to de facto colonial status.

A sign reminding residents and tourists of new social distancing rules is displayed at Manly Beach in Sydney, Australia, on March 23, 2020. (Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)
A sign reminding residents and tourists of new social distancing rules is displayed at Manly Beach in Sydney, Australia, on March 23, 2020. (Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)

If this happens the warmists can well and truly forget their fairy tale, that by the following year, all power will be coming from renewables. We can also forget about the obsolete Turnbull submarine fleet which won’t be delivered even by then.

The politicians have made us too dependent on the communists. It began with the Whitlam and Hawke governments adopting an extreme academic theory about free trade that no other comparable country was naive enough to apply: drop all protection without insisting on full reciprocity. (Hawke also began the bans on water harvesting and nuclear power.) This in many ways was similar to allowing the communist regime into the WTO. The result was predictable: the communists cheated.

What else could we expect from a criminal dictatorship which executes innocent people, especially but not only the Falun Gong, to maintain a lucrative organ-harvesting trade?

We now find that not only have we lost most manufacturing; some of our best farms are little different from the supermarkets whose shelves are being cleared by profiteers to resell in China. Under the ‘paddock to plate’ policy, Australia gains nothing from the enormous profits made from our magnificently clean, untainted food.

With the Beijing-created economic crisis and the collapse of the dollar, Alan Jones has warned that the communists could clean up on our remaining assets at bargain-basement prices.

Alan Jones’s colleague, Michael McLaren, has the solution. Australia propose to President Trump a treaty for a Nuremburg-style tribunal into the cause of crisis to make urgent findings on the balance of probabilities and to assess interim and final damages to be recouped from Beijing’s investments.

David Flint AM is a former chairman of the Australian Press Council and Australian Broadcasting Authority and is an emeritus professor of law.
This article was originally published on The Spectator (Australia).
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
David Flint is an emeritus professor of law, known for his leadership of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy and for his tenure as head of the Australian Broadcasting Authority. He is also a former chairman of the Australian Press Council and the World Association of Press Councils.
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