It's not just about trade

Recently in a speech at the Australian’s Strategic Forum, former Prime Minister Paul Keating lashed out at Australian security agencies and media outlets for their so called “anti-China rhetoric”. It was an egregious example of how our blind pursuit of rapid GDP growth has led to a refusal by many to speak out against an oppressive communist regime, the likes of which the world has not seen in decades.

Students holed up in the Hong Kong Polytechnic University find themselves surrounded by hundreds of Riot Police and Raptor Squad members, and peppered with thousands of tear gas canisters containing dioxin. When they try to escape they are drenched in blue dye for future arrests, and attacked with water cannons which the protesters allege contain chemicals designed to irritate the skin. If they manage to make it out onto the street the police beat them to a bloody pulp. Parents of the trapped students are now taking to the streets in a desperate bid to get their children back safely. Concerned citizens, still needing to make ends meet, protest during their lunch breaks all around Hong Kong. Students and medical staff inside the university are told by police they can safely leave Polytechnic University, only to suffer immediate arrests and brutal beatings at the hands of Beijing backed police.

Despite all of this, our former Labor Prime Minister is more than willing to label those who want to reduce CCP (Communist Chinese Party) sanctioned violence as “pious” and “do gooders”. His speech his speech risks making him sound like a court jester for the likes of United Front, China’s propaganda arm, in some sort of blind pursuit of GDP growth and trade deals, disregarding the cost to the fundamental principles that underpin the free world and our core Australian values.

It’s not just Hong Kong’s struggle that forces the mask to slip off the CCP. Read Document Number 9, a confidential internal communique widely circulated within the Communist Party of China in 2013 that outlines “Noteworthy Problems Related to the Current State of the Ideological Sphere”. What are these “problems”? Pesky ideas such as promoting Constitutional Democracy, Universal Values, Freedom, Human Rights, and Civil Society.

These are the values Xi Jinping’s apparatchiks have identified as threats to the CCP’s legitimacy. These are all the values they are trying to undermine through their United Front propaganda division, armed with a $293,000,000,000 budget conveniently labeled as “stability maintenance”. This budget funds Confucius Institutes all around the world which infiltrate universities and help to spread misinformation and propaganda designed to undermine everything Australia and the free world stands for.

None of that seems to matter to Keating and the never ending free-trade-over-all brigade. They make lofty claims about China lifting 20 per cent of their population out of poverty, while conveniently ignoring the 1.2 million Uighurs currently locked up in re-education camps and ingoring the fact that it was Mao’s Communist Ideology which beggared the Chinese people into poverty in the first place. And this is without mentioning the countless political dissidents, Falun Gong members, and other disagreeable types who at best get thrown into torture camps like Masanjia and escape the organ farms. They ignore China’s growing aggression in the Asia Pacific Region, the debt traps set up in countries with strategic global military positions, and the constant barrage against anyone who dares to speak out whether they be a local dissident or the General Manager of an NBA team.

It is our duty as members of a true liberal democracy to speak out against and criticise the unspeakable actions of the CCP, stand up for the people of Hong Kong, campaign for those imprisoned in Xinjiang, and shine a light on the never ending horrors committed by Beijing’s political class. Keating’s solution of treading lightly and relying on weak appeals to human decency didn’t work over the last three decades. It certainly won’t work now.

Brian Marlow is the Executive Director of the Australian Taxpayers’ Alliance

Brian MarlowHong Kong