The incident last Tuesday in which Australian sailors suffered minor injuries from sonar pulses from a Chinese destroyer couldn’t have come at a worse time for Anthony Albanese.
He’d just finished a very successful trip to Beijing. He was about to again meet President Xi Jinping at APEC in the United States late in the week. The incident was potentially serious in terms of unsettled a much improved relationship.
The HMAS Toowoomba’s sailors had been undertaking the harmless task of unravelling fishing nets from around the ship’s propellers. The vessel was in international waters inside Japan’s exclusive economic zone on its way to a port. It had been supporting United Nations sanctions against North Korea.
