Peter Dutton’s incendiary question time intervention suggesting China had picked Anthony Albanese as its election candidate plumbed new – and dangerous – depths.
For weeks Scott Morrison and his defence minister have been suggesting voters must not be lulled into a false sense of national security bipartisanship. Only the Coalition, their argument goes, can be trusted not to “appease” China.
At the tail-end of question time on Thursday, Dutton dialled the scare campaign up to 11. With Morrison watching on, the defence minister declared he wanted to scotch the idea that both of Australia’s mainstream political parties were equally committed to “defending our nation”. Nothing, claimed Dutton, could be further from the truth.
On matters of national security, he suggested, Albanese was the least-prepared alternative prime minister since Mark Latham.
Then came the deadest of dead cats. “We now see evidence, Mr Speaker, that the Chinese Communist party, the Chinese government, has also made a decision about who they’re going to back in the next federal election, Mr Speaker, and that is open and that is obvious, and they have picked this bloke as that candidate,” Dutton said.
This was by no means an accidental line. Morrison used similar but vaguer language when stating “those who are seeking to coerce Australia” knew that “their candidate” in the election was “the leader of the Labor party”. The implication of these carefully crafted statements was clear – Labor would go soft on China and had Beijing’s backing.
Never mind the fact that Labor has supported the government’s diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics. Never mind that Labor has not only criticised the Chinese government over human rights abuses but has also gone further than the Morrison government by calling for “targeted sanctions on foreign companies, officials and other entities known to be directly profiting from Uyghur forced labour”.
Albanese has rebuffed the former Labor party elder Paul Keating who wants a return to the engagement policies of the 1990s. In a commercial radio interview, when asked whether he stood with Taiwan against the increasing military threat from China, Albanese replied with a crisp: “Yes.”
Penny Wong has repudiated the Chinese embassy for putting out a personalised statement criticising Tony Abbott over his high-profile trip to Taiwan. Labor shares the government’s concerns about China’s militarisation of the South China Sea. The ALP backed the government’s defence strategic update in 2020, together with its $270bn in additional spending on defence capability over a decade, and has said it supports the Aukus nuclear-powered submarine plan despite a bunch of questions about how exactly it will be delivered.
All of that was cast aside on Thursday for a crude political attack designed to suggest Albanese was Beijing’s favoured candidate (so don’t vote for him).
Dutton and Morrison also ignored the director general of the Office of National Intelligence, Andrew Shearer, whose appointment was originally opposed by Labor because it argued he was from the conservative side of politics. Shearer has said national security “is rightly bipartisan in a more partisan world” and his dealings with Albanese and senior Labor colleagues during private security briefings have been “cordial, constructive and professional”.
When Labor’s parliamentary tactician, Tony Burke, rose to complain that Dutton was alluding to treason or sedition on the part of the opposition leader, the minister tried to claim he wasn’t actually tarring Albanese. Dutton stated he was reflecting only “on the actions of the Chinese government” even if that “might be uncomfortable for those opposite”.
And then Dutton dropped the head of Asio, Mike Burgess, into the domestic political fray. “Mine was a reflection on what has been publicly reported and commented on by the director general of Asio and … there are media reports today in relation to these serious matters,” he said.
That was an apparent reference to Burgess’s annual threat assessment speech on Wednesday night in which the intelligence boss said Asio had “recently detected and disrupted a foreign interference plot in the lead-up to an election in Australia”.
It’s important to note that Burgess was vague on the particular election, country or personalities involved – but went out of his way to say it should be taken as a general warning for all politicians and prospective candidates to be on guard for suspicious approaches.
“Attempts at political interference are not confined to one side of politics, and you’d be surprised by the range of countries involved,” he said. Burgess made it clear in an interview a year ago that he did not want Asio to be drawn into domestic political debate and revealed he sometimes had a quiet word telling politicians to cease and desist. That makes Dutton’s invocation of Asio particularly egregious.
Some might suggest Thursday’s theatre was aimed at diverting attention from the government’s political problems: the aged care crisis, internal leaks and spats, pandemic missteps and its tone-deaf response to calls for reform by Grace Tame and Brittany Higgins. So why not ignore it?
Because prioritising politics over national security in this way is dangerous and must be called out. The Dutton intervention undermines institutional structures and conventions. It drew in the Asio chief – someone who is meant to be an apolitical security official – as collateral damage. Burgess himself noted on Wednesday that the alleged election plot had been thwarted, the prospective candidates had been unaware of it, and Australia must not allow the fear of foreign interference to “stoke community division”. That would, he said, “perversely have the same corrosive impact on our democracy as foreign interference itself”.
Dutton’s intervention is also damaging because it attempts to maximise domestic division at a time of intense global challenges and when unity should be an asset. His cabinet colleague Dan Tehan observed four months ago that there was now “bipartisan recognition of the changing geostrategic environment in the Indo-Pacific and the greater assertiveness that we’re seeing from China”. In a plea to stay united on defence, foreign affairs, intelligence and trade issues, Tehan said: “The more that we can make sure that we’re united politically in how we tackle these current strategic issues I think the better it is for us as a nation.”
But that unity is now being trashed for crude political reasons – an election is looming.
