“Chairman Dan” Andrews, the Victorian premier, seems only too willing to turn his state into a puppet of Beijing. He’s got plenty of fellow-travellers working with him behind the scenes.
The Andrews government minister who played a key role in negotiations with China over Victoria’s Belt and Road deal has refused to condemn Chinese government official Zhao Lijian’s tweet of a doctored image depicting a grinning Australian soldier holding a bloodied knife to the throat of an Afghan child.
This is not the first time the Andrews government has cosseted political operatives acting for all the world as agents for Communist China. A pro-Chinese company which publicly promoted Victoria signing on to Xi Xinping’s notorious Belt and Road Initiative was, at the same time, secretly being paid by the Andrews government as an advisor.
As he invariably does, Chairman Dan hand-waved the issue away.
Asked about [Danny] Pearson’s trips to China, Mr Andrews said: “Yeah, he’s been to China, many times. Many of my colleagues have been to China.”
Asked about whether Mr Pearson had accompanied him to China to negotiate the Belt and Road deal, Mr Andrews hit back at a journalist, saying: “And what’s the relevance of that?”
Because the public deserves to know which of their MPs are acting as Beijing’s useful idiots.
Earlier this year The Australian revealed Mr Pearson had given a speech in state parliament lauding China’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak and claiming Australia was “fortunate” China’s reaction had “given us time” to prepare for the pandemic.
Leaked Chinese documents made public this week revealed Chinese authorities initially tried to cover up the severity of COVID-19, with the official public number of confirmed new coronavirus cases in February in Hubei province, where the virus was first detected, less than half the number shown in Hubei Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention documents.
So Pearson is using an Australian parliament as a soapbox for parroting blatantly lying Chinese Communist Party propaganda.
And his boss is kow-towing to Beijing.
However, the Victorian Premier called on the federal government and China to “refocus on trying to repair” the relationship between the two countries[…]
“This is not just our biggest customer, but it is all about jobs. We need a good relationship, but it has to be a fair and respectful one.
What’s respectful about falsely accusing Australian soldiers of appalling war crimes? So we’re just supposed to kiss and make up and keep on taking Beijing’s cash?
Asked how Australia could reset a relationship with a regime that had sanctioned such a tweet, Mr Andrews said he would not cut across federal government responsibilities.
Which is pretty rich, considering he unilaterally decided to sign up for the BRI in deliberate contravention of both federal government and security agency advice. In fact, Andrews’s blind greed is so damaging to Australia’s security that the federal government has been forced to enact legislation that would allow them to overturn the agreement.
Despite calls to repair Australia’s relationship with China, Mr Andrews has sarcastically dismissed Morrison government legislation aimed at allowing the commonwealth to intervene in agreements such as Victoria’s Belt and Road deal[…]
Mr Andrews said he would not be reconsidering Victoria’s Belt and Road agreement with China.
The Australian
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