As profiles go, they do not come any more gushing.
“Australians look forward to Josh Frydenberg as Prime Minister! The ‘Prince of Tennis’ in Australian federal politics, all the way Ace to the final!” it reads.
“What is the charm of the current Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, that makes Australians more favourable to him? I don’t know, I don’t know.
“The Australian Treasurer is ‘hard-core’ to such an extent! Josh has shown a different kind of hard work since he was a child. His tenacity and hard work come from tennis.”
Placed next to the syrupy words about the treasurer on the Chinese-language WeChat channel Australia Asia Daily News are pictures of an athletic young Frydenberg, who took a gap year to play tennis at international level.
“This is Josh Frydenberg, He’s a great tennis player, He is a ‘super scholar’ who learns to be rich and [has] five cars. He is also a loving husband and father to the family, He is also a federal MP who speaks for Kooyong. He is also an outstanding Australian Treasurer in everyone’s eyes.”
It’s not the only positive profile that is currently circulating among the Mandarin-speaking community on WeChat, the internet platform which is sometimes referred to as a Swiss army knife application: a mega app combining the functionality of Facebook, WhatsApp, instant messaging, Uber and PayPal.
Australian Financial News, another news site on the platform, ran a piece comparing Frydenberg to General John Monash, riffing off the fact that they both have Jewish heritage. It has been published twice, in February and again in April, surrounded by ads from Josh Frydenberg.
“Frydenberg has demonstrated the ability of the trinity of legal, financial and political skills, coupled with the foundation of Australian barristers and the physical quality of athletes, he has become an indispensable part of successive governments,” the profile says.
“The effort included a few months ago when he defeated Facebook and Google, two of the world’s largest and most arrogant multinationals, and Frydenberg won the world’s attention.”
It ends by declaring that Fydenberg “is working tirelessly to carry on the legacy of his his Jewish predecessor, the brilliant strategist who turned the tide of World War I.”
In the battle for Kooyong in inner Melbourne, the votes of Chinese-Australians will be critical and what is being circulated online may well take on added significance.
The 2016 census revealed people with Chinese heritage made up 11.6% of Kooyong, and that number has likely increased. Three-quarters are Mandarin speakers.
A UComms poll of 847 residents conducted on 12 April for Climate 200 found independent candidate Monique Ryan held a 59% to 41% two-party-preferred lead over Frydenberg. But there must be a question mark over whether robo-polling picks up non-English-speaking voters.
The rosy profiles of Frydenberg may raise eyebrows for their obsequiousness but they are being backed up with hard cash from the treasurer’s campaign, which is spending thousands of dollars for banner advertisements on these news sites.
Asked about their presence on WeChat, a spokesperson for the treasurer said: “The treasurer does not have an active WeChat account.”
“There is no payment for articles,” she said.
While Frydenberg may not be using his own WeChat account, his campaign team has been particularly active in using WeChat groups like AAN and Melbourne Online CN2MEL to recruit Chinese-speaking volunteers to the campaign.
A person can subscribe to a group by scanning a QR code and the ads invite volunteers to join groups to campaign for Frydenberg.
The recruitment advertisements have been appearing under the national Covid update and the Shanghai Covid update, two of the most well-read articles on AAN.
It is unclear who operates AAN. It used to be the official news partner of Tencent, the owner of WeChat, but the site parted company and now operates separately. The editor is David Liu, but who is behind the site is opaque.
AFN is owned by David Han, a property investor who was previously part owner of Sydney Today, part of the larger Australian Chinese Media Today group.
Han’s site has just got back to regular posting after a hiatus in the wake of a defamation suit in which AFN paid out $350,000 in 2020 to former Macquarie banker Guy Hedley, who now heads Sydney-based funds manager Atlas Advisors.
In contrast to the gentle treatment of Josh Frydenberg, AAN has been far more probing of the independent candidate, Monique Ryan.
“The ‘independent candidate’ in the Victorian Chinese constituency challenges the Australian Treasurer, but is she really ‘independent’?,” the headline reads on one of the few articles about her.
The article itself reproduced a translated version of the Herald Sun’s story which said “The self-proclaimed independent candidate … regularly posted privately on social media about her love for Labor Party legends, raising fresh questions about her political leanings.”
Ryan has also been engaging with the Chinese media, doing a video interview with “Tianhua News” a much smaller site, more akin to a blogger site.
The presenter interviewed Ryan via an interpreter on issues including her stance on climate change, why she was running against Frydenberg and Australia’s relationship with China. Although one of the slides featured the Herald Sun article on Ryan’s previous Labor affiliations, the interviewer did not ask about this subject.
A spokesman for Ryan’s campaign acknowledged that the Chinese-speaking Australian community would be important in Kooyong.
“We have noticed just how prolific Mr Frydenberg is in the Chinese media sector. That profile left us scratching our heads,” he said.
The spokesman said Ryan’s campaign had plans for more outreach to the local Chinese speaking community.
