He can threaten Winston Peters all he likes, but it’s undeniable that former NSW premier and ALP heavyweight Bob Carr is a vocal proponent of Communist China. In fact, the Financial Review in 2018 openly described Carr as “China’s pawn”.
Yet, as the Fin Review noted, Carr was once openly critical of the CCP’s “ludicrously outdated” ideology. Then, in 2014, he was appointed to head the Australia China Relations Institute at the University of Technology in Sydney in 2014. The Institute, the South China Morning Post notes, “takes funding from a range of companies that do business with or in China, including Beijing’s state-owned China Construction Bank”.
“Since then,” writes the Fin Review, he has come to personify the lobby he once attacked, lauding the achievements of Xi Jinping and condemning his critics.” He condemned few critics more vociferously than successive Australian governments.
But what, exactly, is the nature of the regime for which Carr so vehemently barracks?
We have too many people in this country defending Xi’s China, or simply asserting that its rise and hegemony are unstoppable. None of this works as a future we should want […] For Xi’s China, far more than Putin’s Russia or Khamenei’s Iran, to say nothing of that pugnacious, pygmy, totalitarian North Korea, is a very serious and growing threat to the international liberal order held together by the US and its system of alliances since 1945 […]
When people who are household names in this country – whether in business, politics or academia – lionise the party’s governance of China, they and their audiences need sharply to be reminded the party arrests, censors, tortures, disappears and executes dissidents and civil right activists. That is not a China the hegemony of which in Asia we should be in any way willing to accept.
As former deputy prime minister John Anderson says, it should never be forgotten that a communist dictatorship will always act like a communist dictatorship. Too many useful (to Beijing) idiots, in business, politics, and the media, forget this lesson. Even after it was so brutally driven home during the Covid pandemic. Yet, even the businesses who paid for the CCP’s autocratic petulance have chosen to forget and rush back in with their hands held out.
The insistence by Beijing’s acolytes, fellow travellers and useful idiots that calling it out is “Cold War thinking” and risks taking the world down a dangerous path are seriously muddled. We are on a dangerous path because Xi’s China and Putin’s Russia are on a war footing and we have all been caught napping.
There was World War I and World War II, then Cold War I. We are now in the early stages of Cold War II. We must work hard to so constrain and deter the authoritarian powers and their fifth columns in our midst that Cold War II does not become World War III, which would be a catastrophe for us all.
To think our way through this situation, we require a robust strategy underpinned by a clear-eyed grasp of the history of China (and Russia, Iran and North Korea) and a vision for a better and more viable world on the other side. Right now, we seem barely to have a strategy at all and there is no sign of a coherent vision for a world order in which Putin and Xi are gone, Iran liberated from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the mullahs, or North Korea from the Kim mafia. We need that vision.
The Australian
Instead, we’ve got a cavalcade of greedy morons and Quislings.
And they’re as intolerant of criticism as Xi Xinping himself.
Just ask Winston Peters.
