Is Australia about to Drag New Zealand into a War With China?
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On a world scale, Australian politics are tame. Of course, we are a modern nation and have white supremacists and billionaire cowboys running for parliament, but we don’t normally let them in. Our politics has been stable, cautious and central for my whole life.
For years we argued about what to do with 1.39% of the global total of refugees, who we affectionately called boat people, and whether GDP should be 5% 10% or 15%. More recently, we voted for gay marriage and this has kept us busy. We find an issue, print some paper, then we move on.
Recently though, the halls of power decided that we needed to take up an American cause, the scariest kind and that China is going to be our new push-button political issue.
Taking a tough stance on China polls really nicely. Especially in the early days of covid, but even before covid, people blamed the Chinese for making houses unaffordable — after eating avo toast became a meme. We also have a lot of old people. Half of Australians are over the age of 37, and the elderly aren’t exactly tolerant of new Asian migration because they like to snack on their memberberries.
The real beginning of all this was when Malcome Turnbull, has a meeting with Trump in February 2018, the agenda, talking shit about China.
In August 2018, Australia blocked Huawei from its 5G network. The first country in the world to do so.
With this China issued its first threats, but Australia said no. NO Huawei. GO AWWWAAAYYY!!!!
The strong stance got a lot of attention and the ban split the world, with many western countries following and locking out the Chinese tech giant from some of the best European markets and eventually the US market.
I think that would have happened regardless because Trump hated Huawei.
He escalated that conflict to blocking all US chip technology being shipped and used in Huawei phones. Ironically, this move that was supposed to cripple Chinese tech dominance encouraged the country to set more ambitious goals for ending reliance on the United States for chips.
Here’s some news from the time — — “Huawei’s rapid rise and links to the Chinese state have long been a cause for U.S. concern. But tension has escalated significantly under President Donald Trump, particularly since Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou, daughter of founder Ren Zhengfei, was arrested in Canada after a U.S. request, accused of violations of American sanctions on Iran at the end of 2018.”
America arrested the daughter of Huawei CFO, for the lols.
So basically America got real aggressive towards China and Australian politicians eager to do their bidding also discovered it polls well and in a few years, we departed from previous Australian policy on China.
We used to be super stoked on China.
In 2013 Kevin Rudd was Prime Minister and he spoke Chinese. We even leased a Chinese company the Port of Darwin, which we are now trying to buy back.
Aggressive Independent Covid Inquiry finds Nothing Costs us Barley, Timber, Seafood Coal and Wine Exports
The inquiry found nothing.
Here’s the outcome of the weirdly aggressive stance we took:
- China imposed an 80.5 per cent tariff on Australia’s barley exports in May last year following the conclusion of an 18-month investigation.
- Punitive tariffs of up to 200% were imposed on Australian Wine imports effectively wiping out a 1.3 billion dollar market.
- Coal imports dropped to virtually zero in the first two months of this year from a 2020 high of 9.46 million tonnes in June.
This is crazy. In 2012 we lost our minds over a carbon tax because it might hurt miners or impact the precious coal industry, but China blocks all coal exported from Australia, and it’s not time to fix relations.
After China called Australia out for war crimes, the PM said repugnant and demanded an apology on national TV
PM demands an apology.
No one apologised. In fact, they doubled down and demanded Australia apologise to the Afgan families, which the Chief of defence forces did, ‘sincerely and unreservedly for the killing of at least 39 Afghan civilians.
While this was all happening Scott translated a letter that said democratic nations are the best into Mandarin and put in on WeChat.
Obviously, China censored it. The CCP was already removing content and trying to convince world leaders not to say that covid started in China around then, and why are you talking about protecting your sovereignty and insinuating that China isn’t enlightened? Are these underhanded insults.
What’s weird is Australia hasn’t called out China for genocide, which is easily the worse thing China is doing
You’d expect a man like Scott who demands an apology, to not puss out when it’s time to acknowledge the systematic extermination of a people, but nah.
Let’s be More Like New Zealand
New Zealand isn’t trying to police an emerging superpower half a world away.
New Zealand is playing it safe and minding its own business.
Although they recently acknowledged human rights abuses in Xinjiang, which I’m sure can’t fill the hole where your Uighur liver used to, but at least New Zealand took a stand on something that mattered.
And they did this in a super diplomatic way and through all the appropriate channels. No one went on TV or translated a rant to WeChat.
This is Nanaia Mahuta, New Zealand’s foreign minister.
When asked about NZ’s relations with China she said, “It’s important for us to ensure we are respectful, consistent and predictable in the way we convey issues we agree on, but also on issues we don’t agree on. And it’s part of our maturing relationship,”
This whole interview with her is really good. Especially the part where she says we understand our place in the world, we are a small population in the pacific.
I like how they focus on how we couldn’t stop Indonesia from killing a bunch of people in West Papua in our own backyard, why are we suddenly trying to flex on China?
I think by comparison New Zealand is being very sensible.
New Zealand, Will You Help Australia be Sensible Too?
It’s in your interest because if we go to war, you are coming with us.
You’ve always been less keen on war than us. I was reading about it and you only provided engineering support in a lot of America’s recent wars. That sounds like a great gig. We can just send our elite tradies to the front lines to fix America’s battleships as they battle it out for supremacy and fight over Taiwan.
Trump Definitely Played a Hand in All This Shit
brookings.ed wrote this in 2016 — “After forty-four years of establishing diplomatic relations, the world’s two greatest economic powers have forged unprecedentedly close ties. Unsurprisingly, the current relationship reflects varying degrees of cooperation as well as competition.”
Obama himself has said, “The relationship between the United States and China is the most important bilateral relationship of the 21st century.
Yes, dude.
But then the meme economy tells a compelling story too.
A Chinese propaganda newspaper encouraged Beijing to bomb Australia if Canberra supports US military action in protecting Taiwan
Can you not.
Why has this been allowed to go on? Why are we tangling with superpowers for no reasons?
I know we were raised on war and the spirit of the ANZAC, but realistically China will decimate us. Mandarin looks hard, I don’t want to have to teach it to my kids.
Yeah, nah, yeah, Nah…we could take ‘em.
1.5 billion vs 24 million.
Every Australian would have to kill 62.5 Chinese.
Sure, America and the western squad will come help, but how about we just don’t get involved in any wars.
And after seeing how greedy nations are with the vaccine rollout, who really know where the priorities of other nations lie. I don’t think America can get here faster than a nuclear bomb, and it doesn’t matter who comes to help or what’s fired after all our capital cities join the desert, oh which by the way, glows!
Robots can mine the iron and coal we used to sell them, while they terraform the desert.
Also China is building a space station.
Here’s My Long Term Strategy for Stability In The Region
We need to detach a little from the US. This theme is pretty consistent. Most of Australia’s fear of China stems from the deteriorating relationship with the US.
“The People’s Liberation Army Navy knows that if it conflicts with a US ship, it runs the risk of rapid escalation into full-blown conflict. But an Australian ship is a different proposition altogether. If one of our ships were to be rammed and disabled within the 12-mile limit by a Chinese vessel, we don’t have the capacity to escalate. If the Americans backed us in, then the Chinese would back off. But if Washington hesitated or, for whatever reasons, decided not to or was unable immediately to intervene, then China would have achieved an enormous propaganda win, exposing the USA as a paper tiger not to be relied on by its allies. My judgement was that given the volatile geopolitical climate at the time, especially between the USA and China, it wasn’t a risk worth taking.” — Malcolm Turnbull
Let’s Try Align With The ASEAN Region and Keep America as a Friend but Not be it’s Lap Dog
270 million people live in Indonesia. It’s going to be a developed country in 10–30 years.
In this square alone there are about 400 million people, and they object to expansionist China too, mainly because they are what China would be expanding into.
The ASEAS region is a very nice buffer.
Did you know that Indonesia isn’t just Bali: It’s also a trillion-dollar economy and one of the fastest-growing in the world. I want a super-powered Indonesia between us and an emerging China.
Can foreign policy agenda number one be we make Indonesia visa-free, tax-free and start defence exercises with these lethals
We can help them get rid of the pirates as training.
Did you know there are still pirates in the sea right above us? If ever you needed evidence we went a superpower or even a great power, look no further.
I think that if we help build up ASEAN, we can maybe join or be like part of that alliance, and we don’t need to follow America into wars anymore and depend on them.
They can still come help if shit ever pops off. They will stay stoked on us. We just need to get the emerging ASEAN squad onto our side and help develop all these countries to rebalance the region.
