Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release Friday, 15 July 2016

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

Time for reality check on South China Sea

War or peace? That is what Australia must decide as we choose how to deal with the issue of China’s claims in the South China Sea.

In their response to the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s ruling this week, both our government and opposition are parroting lines formulated by dangerous neo-conservatives in the USA, who insist that no country will be allowed to rise to a position where it can rival the USA militarily or economically. However, since future Iraq war criminals Defence Secretary Dick Cheney and his Undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz formulated this as a foreign policy doctrine in 1992 under the first Bush administration, China has pulled off one of the greatest economic transformations in history, through massive investment in nation-building infrastructure. The USA, on the other hand, has suffered a self-inflicted economic collapse under British-influenced free trade and Wall Street’s unchecked speculative looting. Now China doesn’t just rival the USA economically, it leaves it for dead, to which the USA’s only response is military aggression, backed up by the only thing it beats other countries at—military spending, at around $700 billion per year more than the next seven countries combined.

Barack Obama calls his aggression towards China his “Asia Pivot”. It has coincided with the USA’s dangerous Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) targeting of China and Russia’s nuclear deterrent that George W. Bush and Cheney started and Obama continued. The Asia Pivot has involved a beefed up US military presence in the Asia-Pacific region, to which Australia has meekly played host, including of 2,500 US Marines, the so-called “tip of the spear”, stationed in Darwin. It has also involved Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a free trade agreement for the Pacific which excludes the biggest economy in the Pacific—China. (This is to China’s benefit actually, as the TPP is not really about trade, but asserting the power of London’s and Wall Street’s multinational corporations over governments). Obama lies that the Asia Pivot is not targeted at containing China, but China knows it is, and it is this reality that has escalated the tensions in the region.

Here’s what the Australian government and most media won’t tell you about the South China Sea issue:

The Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague usually only adjudicates cases referred to it by both parties to a dispute. The previous Philippines president referred this case unilaterally; the same president let the USA again open military bases in the Philippines, which provoked outrage in the Philippines and contributed to him losing the recent presidential election. The new Philippines president has downplayed the Hague decision and reiterated his desire to cooperate with China.
Referring the case to the PCA was a violation of the Declaration of Conduct signed by China and all members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), including the Philippines, committing themselves to resolve the territorial disputes through negotiation.
China therefore completely rejects the ruling; however, so would the USA in a similar situation, as Washington has refused to ratify the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Tom Clarke of the Timor Sea Justice Campaign points out in today’s Sydney Morning Herald that Australia has also ignored the international law of the sea in its 14-year bullying campaign to deny East Timor its rightful oil resources.
In response to the ruling China has insisted it fully supports freedom of navigation in the South China Sea for trade, almost all of which goes to and from China—China is no threat to its own trade. However, China emphasised it does not approve of the USA’s provocative parading of its naval might in the area. What China objects to is deployments such as that in early March of the USS John C. Stennis, a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, which spent five days tooling around the eastern part of the South China Sea accompanied by its “Carrier Strike Group”—two Aegis guided-missile destroyers, one guided-missile cruiser, and a “fast combat support” supply ship. Between them these ships carry enough manpower, firepower and air support to blockade every shipping lane, board or sink every vessel, and invade, occupy, or bomb any island for hundreds of square miles. This is the threat to “freedom of navigation”! And the main purpose of Aegis destroyers is to penetrate onshore defences, knock out the target’s nuclear first-strike capability, and deliver a nuclear strike of their own; they are billed as a “missile defence system”, but are just about the most offensive weapons in the world. If the shoe were on the other foot, would the USA tolerate this much firepower on its doorstep? The ALP’s unhinged defence spokesman Stephen “Yosemite Sam” Conroy is making even Julie Bishop, who on behalf of the US almost started WWIII over Ukraine, look moderate, by demanding that we deploy our own ships to tag along in the USA’s massive wake.

China is Australia’s biggest trading partner. However, contrary to what you have been led to believe, it is not financially taking over Australia through aggressive foreign investment. Official figures show that China’s $75 billion level of foreign investment in Australia is a mere 2.5 per cent of the total, which makes it the seventh largest foreign investor after the USA on $860 billion (28.4 per cent), the UK on $500 billion (16.5 per cent), and, of all places, Finance Minister Mathias Cormann’s birthplace of Belgium on $238.5 billion (7.9 per cent).

China is, however, offering to collaborate with Australia, and every other country in the region and in the world, including the USA, on mutually beneficial economic development. It has invited all nations to participate in its One Belt, One Road New Silk Road initiative, to upgrade and expand the world’s trading infrastructure. By contrast to Obama’s exclusion of China from his TPP poison pill, China invited all nations including the USA to join its Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), an invitation which Obama actively pressured nations to reject.

Not long before he died, former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser warned that the USA’s aggression towards China, with Australia’s support, was creating the danger of a nuclear war in which Australia would be a target. Australia has a clear choice: pursue a shamelessly hypocritical policy in support of discredited allies that risks destroying the world in a nuclear war, or work collaboratively with the nations that want a new international economic order based on respecting national sovereignty and mutually beneficial economic development, as the pathway to prosperity and peace.

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