Labor clueless on foreign affairs

Goodness knows why the Chinese government would want to put pressure on the Albanese government during an election campaign, but that’s what they are doing.

Research vessel Tan Suo Yi Hao, having completed some joint research with New Zealand (why?) has decided to go home and take the scenic route around the bottom of Australia.

One of the attractions they are taking in is Australia’s subsea internet cable network connecting the east and south of the continent to the Middle East and Europe.

The ship has 11 laboratories, but also underwater drones capable of descending 10,000 metres, and while it does legitimate research, it is also understood to collect intelligence.

Our modern world has few redundancies, and our supply lines are brittle. Cut the cables that link our internet to the world and maybe your credit card won’t work…and worse.

Sun Tzu’s Art of War advises how to win, hopefully without ever having to fight. Our fragile society gives opponents just that opportunity. Cripple the power grid, communication systems, navigation systems, water, sewerage and commerce and we would all start to starve within a very short time.

So this is a seriously menacing activity which should have the Australian public, as well as both Australian political parties, up in arms. It should be poison to the party that is seen as weak on China, and that should favour Dutton.

But why would the Chinese seek to weaken Albo? Wouldn’t they prefer to deal with the “handsome boy” rather than “thug” Dutton?

Or is this more disruptive Wolf Warrior “diplomacy” designed to terrify rather than charm, where being a friend can be a highly uncomfortable thing?

Perhaps it is to tempt Dutton into criticizing them.

In 2022 Morrison’s more belligerent tone towards the CCP was said to be responsible for the loss of Bennelong, which has a 21% Chinese population.

6 marginal or winnable seats this election – Aston, Menzies, Reid, Bennelong, Moreton and Chisholm – all have Chinese populations above 10%. A Dutton misstep could leave them all in Labor’s column.

Or perhaps they see chaos as their friend. The Chinese have been interfering in various Anglosphere elections for years now, including the US, Canada, and most recently even the Adelaide City Council. It doesn’t seem to matter who they favour as long as it creates dischord.

There’s even a new element with a good cop on the scene with the Chinese Ambassador approaching Australia to make a united front against US tariffs.

This is a formidable challenge for Albo, Wong and Marles, none of whom have outlived their pasts as student politicians.

In student-politics world, policies are performative, and pusillanimous. You can side with Palestinian terrorists without it having any impact in the real world. Spitting in the eye of America is de rigeur without costing a single person their job or destroying their business.

But now they are running a country, with real world consequences for their decisions, but no sign they understand this. So China is pouring the pressure on, maybe because ultimately, embarrassment and dishonour, are endpoints of their own.

And Albanese is making things worse for himself by almost deliberately alienating our security overlord, the US.

 Donald Trump is behaving like a bear with a hangover, so why would you poke him?

It’s not as though in Trump’s world he’s likely to see Albo as any more than a bad set of pronouns. Trump likes a man’s man, but he’s even more into an autarch’s autarch.

Mark Carney, Canadian PM, is clubbable, unlike Justin Trudeau, his predecessor, but Albo doesn’t even reach Justinian levels.

Isn’t it bad enough that he sent Kevin Rudd as his ambassador to the US; the man who described Trump as “the most destructive president in history”, “a traitor to the West’, and “a village idiot”.

Then in the mid-term elections in the US Albo made the nonsensical claim that “democracy is on the ballot” – the claim the Democrats were making because Trump was “obviously” Hitler, and they thought that might help them win the election.

Election interference from foreign politicians is generally counterproductive. Albo’s is likely to have had zero effect on the outcome of the US elections, but counterproductive by alienating  the winner of the presidential election 2 years later.

And now Albanese is running this election campaign on the basis that you can’t vote for Peter Dutton because he is a bunyip Donald Trump.

That might benefit Dutton, should he win the election and have to negotiate with Trump, but it is not likely to help Albo, or Australia, if Albo wins.

It’s been said that Australia is in a worse defence position than it was in 1939. That’s not true. The leader of the government in 1939 was Robert Menzies, and of the opposition, John Curtin.

There’s no way Albo would have been Labor leader, or even in the cabinet in that period. And he’s the best the government has got.

It is not a uniquely dangerous world, we’ve just come out of a period of unique peace and tranquility, but Australia is uniquely ill-placed to deal with the challenges a normal world poses because we have voted children into positions of power.