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Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release Friday, 30 June 2017

Craig Isherwood‚ National Secretary
PO Box 376‚ COBURG‚ VIC 3058
Phone: 1800 636 432
Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Website: http://cec.cecaust.com.au
 

Of course China hopes to influence Australia—for peaceful economic cooperation

Australia is a battleground in the Anglo-American neoconservative agenda to stop China from rivalling the United States as an economic or military power. In economic terms, the agenda has failed: China is kicking America’s butt all over the world. The only superiority left for the neocons is military hardware, on which the USA spends $700 billion per year to China’s $100 billion. To keep Australia valuing America’s military might over our trade with China, on which our economy completely depends, the neocons have to convince us that China is a military threat. It is clear that the recent succession of high-level visits from US government officials, including Vice President Mike Pence and the demented warmonger Senator John McCain, and the current blizzard of yellow peril/“reds under the bed”-style propaganda in the ABC and Fairfax media accusing China of trying to influence Australia, is intended to do just that.

What does China want? The Hobbesian British view of international affairs is that China wants to dominate the world, as that is the natural aspiration of any leading power; i.e. “that’s what we British imperialists would do, so that’s what China intends to do”. Putting aside that in 5,000 years China has never colonised another country, and that the only countries with which it has territorial disputes are its near neighbours—compared with, say, Britain’s dispute with Argentina over the Malvinas islands (“Falklands” to the British)—where is the evidence that China wants to dominate the world?

The evidence shows otherwise. China hopes to recruit the entire world to what has become known as the “project of the century”, its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which has been an open conspiracy since Chinese President Xi Jinping announced it in September 2013. The project will connect Asia with Western Europe, the Middle East and North Africa through high-speed rail connections, new ports, canals, shipping lanes and economic development zones. The idea is to extend this concept across every continent.

Why is China doing this? There is certainly self-interest in China’s plan: it wants to maintain the economic growth that in one generation has lifted nearly a billion Chinese out of poverty, by sharing the formula for that growth with the world, to uplift the masses of poor in Asia and Africa into prosperous future trading partners. The contrast between this approach and hundreds of years of European colonialism couldn’t be more stark. Australian politicians such as Julie Bishop may cast doubt on China’s intentions—which is actually just cynical posturing on behalf of the USA—but the Australian and global economies are only functioning since the 2008 global financial crisis because China ploughed some $20 trillion into its productive sectors to generate a recovery; now it is unleashing the next step: global-scale economic development to drive prosperity through peaceful cooperation.

If China’s plans are a threat, it is only to the anti-progress, green-justified take down of nation states which has prevailed over the last three to four decades. China’s alternative to austerity and deindustrialisation would unleash growth and strengthen sovereign nations. The collaboration required to build projects that are impossible for one nation alone, or which cross borders, has the potential to make war obsolete. Uplifting the people of unstable and impoverished regions by building their economies can render terrorism a thing of the past.

‘Buying’ influence?

The timing of the hysterical anti-China campaign in Australia is clearly directed at preventing Australia from orienting to the BRI pathway out of economic and financial crisis. It has erupted in the wake of China’s historic Belt and Road Forum in May, attended by 110 countries including 29 heads of government, but to which Australia only sent a rather uninterested trade minister.

Australian Attorney General George Brandis has said that Chinese influence-buying through political donations and other means is “foreign interference” and represents a “threat to our sovereignty” and the “integrity of our democracy”. There is no doubt that foreign donations to Australian political parties are aimed at influencing their policies, and the CEC has long insisted they be banned. However, to single out China is selective outrage.

Chinese businessmen are not alone in hoping to influence the Australian government through donations. The banks do it, which has thus far saved them from an inquiry; British peer Lord Ashcroft donated $1 million in 2004 for the re-election of royal sycophant John Howard; businessman Graeme Wood donated $1.5 million to the Greens to promote his radical deindustrialisation agenda. In terms of a government buying influence, Britain and the USA already own what China is being accused of trying to buy.

In his 2014 book Dangerous Allies, the late former prime minister Malcolm Fraser spilled the beans on the fact that Australia has never been independent. Until WWII imperial Britain controlled our affairs, and post-war the USA, acting in the imperial British tradition, has been more prominent in calling the shots, but Britain has continued to play a backroom role. Fraser wrote: “Britain had the capacity to drag us into wars, and America now has the capacity to drag us into wars, and I think it is time we grew up….”

The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, ASIO, first sounded the alarm over Chinese donations and is currently investigating Chinese figures prominent in Australian politics. However, ironically, ASIO is itself an example of foreign interference in Australian politics. The organisation was effectively forced on the Australian government in 1949 at the insistence of British intelligence, was set up and run by Britain’s MI5, and throughout its murky history its officers have called London “Head Office”. It was a vital component in Britain’s establishment of the Five Eyes spying alliance, which is a supranational force in global policy making that will not tolerate elected governments of the Five Eyes nations challenging its geopolitical agenda. It has demonstrated this intolerance in the case of Donald Trump’s desire to improve relations with Russia and China, in its antagonism towards UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-war, anti-regime change policies in the UK, and historically in Australia when Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s government bucked Anglo-American control by asserting financial independence and ownership of our own resources, and even threatened to close Pine Gap. Governor-General Sir John Kerr was acting on the orders of the Queen when he sacked Whitlam, and also had documented links to the CIA. In language eerily similar to British intelligence agencies today in regard to UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, the CIA declared Whitlam a security risk to his own country.

Who’s influencing Australia’s foreign policy?

There can be no doubt who is influencing Australia’s foreign policy, and it isn’t China. In fact, with political shifts underway in both the USA and UK—evidenced in the election of Donald Trump and the dramatic rise in support for Jeremy Corbyn, both in their very different ways anathema to neoconservatives—Australia is expected to take point on pushing Anglo-American hegemony in the region.

The 12 June Australian Financial Review spoke to Jake Sullivan, a former senior foreign policy aide to Hillary Clinton, who conveyed concern over Trump’s China policy. Saying that he did not expect President Xi to win Trump over so easily, Sullivan indicated the neocon expectation that Australia would continue to resist China regardless of Trump, saying that “we need Australia as one of our closest allies in the region to be clear-eyed by the challenge China poses even as we all work together to avoid confrontation and manage China’s rise”.

Angus Grigg and Lisa Murray reported in the 15 June AFR that Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, once considered the “most pro-China prime minister since Gough Whitlam”, has shifted from “Panda-hugger” to “China hawk” in his attitudes towards China: “Now his government’s position is arguably more strident than that of the United States, a role reversal partly due to the Trump administration’s retreat from the region.” The piece cites a number of foreign-policy experts saying Australia is now taking a tougher line on China than hawkish Americans, which doesn’t make sense at a time when US-China relations are improving and China Sea tensions have calmed down.

In other words, to underscore how alarming this is, our government is letting Australia be used by insane Anglo-American neocons who are upset that Trump and China are getting along, to provoke conflict with China, conflict which before Trump was on a trajectory towards nuclear war, as Malcolm Fraser and others warned.

It would be a positive game-changer for the world if Trump’s USA and China aligned on the Belt and Road policy and its global extensions, but a nightmare for the neocon warmongers. Australia has a decision to make: disrupt that potential as the flag-bearer for an outdated Anglo-American order, or forge our own pathway towards a future of economic development, achieving true independence along the way.

Click here for a free copy of the CEC’s full-colour pamphlet, The World Land-Bridge: Peace on Earth, Good Will towards All Men, which details the potential of the Belt and Road Initiative for Australia and the world.

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