What now for Australia-China relations ?

good afternoon it's very nice to see you all here before we begin may i acknowledge on behalf of us all the aboriginal owners of this land on which the university is based and pay our respects and to their elders and their traditions past present and emerging my name is david goodman i'm the director of the china studies center here at the university of sydney and we're holding today this round table and i'd like to introduce to you the people who will be speaking glenda corporal from the australian will be the chair and moderator she will be well known to you as one of our country's leading journalists on china's development over the last few uh years to her is james laurenson the director of the australia china research institute at the university of technology sydney across the road from here in the middle is jocelyn che who's very famous of course of having taught some of you chinese many years ago at this university who then went on to work with dfat and is now a visiting professor at the university of sydney and finally on the end of the row is kevin hopgood brown who is has been for many years for many decades a leading figure in economic relations between china and australia over now to you glenda to ask the questions and to get on with the uh discussion thank you thanks david and thanks very much for coming and and being here on person particularly on a on a friday um when a lot of people um perhaps like to be at home but i think it shows your commitment that you've turned up i mean this is a this is actually a very very important subject for for australia and for our for our future and our role in the region um it's been an amazing two weeks um in in in australia i mean we've had a change of government uh we've had the new prime minister anthony albanese jump on a plane and immediately go to japan meet up with president biden and modi and the japanese prime minister um and then we've had penny wong make two separate trips to the pacific uh and then we've got this sort of weird diplomacy where one yi the chinese foreign minister is sort of island hopping in the pacific and penny wong is is going back and forth in the pacific and um and she's also there's there also was a possibility of uh pacific islands um signing a security and economic pact with china and that seems to have not happened as yet so suddenly in the last two weeks foreign affairs is right uh right on the front page of australian newspapers and the media and also um this government i think after a government that hasn't been that interested in the region is signaling they're taking the region very very seriously um two weeks ago uh some of us involved was with a chapter um doing a book on china 50 years of australia china relations met here just before the election and um there was sort of this uh feeling of anticipation of change and maybe you know some hope of an improvement in the relationship but the the tone uh seems to be a bit different in the past two weeks than what i might might have expected with albanese saying australia hasn't changed china has changed um we've got prospect of penny wong major changes in the public service interesting to see what happens at dfat we've got um chiang lai still in jail in china and her former uh partner was on sky news nick coyle who some of us knew when we were in beijing so i'm i'm going to start i'm going to we've got a very distinguished panel here very experienced in china um and and kevin um i'd like to get you to start what how how's the past two weeks gone i mean you know how do you think that from what you've seen the last two weeks what does it show about where australia china relations are are going to go well thank you glenda and thank you for the china study center and professor goodman and and his team for inviting me here today i'm it's a pleasure to see you all and this is the first face-to-face event i've been to in two years so it's it's exciting and novel and it's great to see you but glinda in answer to your question i think the last two weeks have shown that we've still have a challenging road ahead of us if i can digress with a with a small story in the 1920s when albert einstein was a professor at princeton university in the united states the field of quantum physics was changing at a rapid speed every month there were new discoveries new theories every year the whole discipline was was turned on its head and one year um it was final examination time and the dean of the school came rushing into einstein's office and he said uh professor we've got a big problem and einstein said well what's the problem he said well i've just seen the exam that you plan to give your students and the questions are the same questions that you asked last year and einstein said well what's the problem and the uh profes the dean said well don't you realize if everyone knows what the questions are it's going to be a disaster and einstein said yes the questions are the same but the answers are totally different and for many years the first 30 years that i've worked with china i felt like we in the west always asked the same questions the china answers were different from year to year every five years china was changing so rapidly it was all we could do to keep up with the changes and understand and the china questions were always will china continue to reform are the reforms sustainable will the communist party of china change and things like this but over the last 10 years i think we've seen that the questions we ask about china are actually different and we're now asking questions like what are china's global aspirations how is it managing its relations with its neighbors is the state more aggressive domestically internationally and as we grapple with these new questions and seek answers to them we're learning about how we can best manage our own relationship uh with china so glenda as you referred to the election i think we all viewed the election as a potential tipping point where perhaps some new approaches could be tried at least new in the context of what we've done over the last two or three years i see that there have been a number of very positive developments not only just over the last two weeks but but the last couple of months and first would be china has dispatched a new ambassador to australia ambassador xiao has made some very public and i think conciliatory and respectful comments about australia and what he sees as uh his hopes uh for the future of the bilateral relationship and that the change in that tone i think is very significant on the positive side uh premier league sent a congratulatory message to um prime minister albanese and that was positive as well prime minister albanese while he was in uh japan for the uh for the quad said he's not going to use the china issue for domestic political purposes and i thought that was a very important statement because that in my view hasn't been the case over the last three years so for the prime minister to say we're not going to politicize this relationship i thought was a very positive comment and then finally as glenda said foreign minister wong has been in the pacific on two trips last night i saw her interviewed and lee sales asked a very pointed question about china's activities uh in the pacific and i thought uh foreign minister wong handled it beautifully she said i'm here to focus on what we're doing not on what china is doing and i thought that was a very constructive a very positive message on the not so positive side while he was in japan prime minister albany said china has changed we haven't not only do i think that's not correct in fact australia has changed a lot over the last three to five years but i think it it feeds into this narrative that we've heard from our political leaders over the last several years that all of this discord in the bilateral relationship is china's problem they caused it we didn't and that unilateral view i think is incorrect and so i was a little bit disappointed when i heard the prime minister state that i realized that he can't perhaps jump in to the reconciliation process immediately but let's see what happens and then finally the the prime minister said that china would need to drop its trade penalties against australia as a precondition to further political engagement and as one who's negotiated in china for many years you don't put pre preconditions on discussions you have discussions you you hear each other out and then you start to to sort uh solutions find common ground and and build some consensus so i thought that those two statements from the prime minister were a little bit disappointing there are plenty of positive elements i think moving forward and louise edwards who is here today uh co-authored an off uh an article with colin hesseltine a couple of days ago that had some wonderful pieces of advice uh in them uh let's reinvigorate dfat and put it at the central place in our interaction diplomatic interaction with china let's stop the public demonizing of china and revert to quiet diplomacy again every time we make public inflammatory comments about china i know how china is going to respond you know how china is going to respond and there's there's just no constructive place for that kind of baiting we need to build our china capabilities centers like the china study center and similar endeavors across australia need to be bolstered and we need to increase the number of our own citizens who have a china knowledge capability finally and this may be a little bit controversial for some i think we need a more independent foreign policy for the last few years i felt like we've been fawning a bit too much over the united states and falling in line i thought publicly behind a washington dc view of the world we don't need to do that the united states is going to be our friend even if we disagree on some key issues and it's in australia's interest that we maintain a and re-discover an independent foreign policy so i've gone on enough thank you glenda for that on the question of questions we will have in probably about half an hour i'll open the floor up for some for some questions so you can have a chance to think some up for our panelists now jocelyn jocelyn is um you've had two stints in beijing and one in hong kong um so you've got a very experienced foreign foreign affairs background and also you signed this open letter a couple of or two weeks ago to try and um to call for a more constructive foreign policy so what's you what's your take on where we are now and um given particularly your unique foreign affairs background thank you glenda and and thank you everyone for coming along this afternoon it's a pleasure to be back on campus again um so long since i was here i got a bit lost on the way and it's good to find some many familiar faces here also now my experience as you said goes back a long way i've been engaged in australia china relations and more broadly australian asian relations and we have all benefited all australia has benefited from that long period it was a period which we might call globalization with reform economic reforms in the 1980s floating the dollar and so on it helped us to maintain a standard of living um you could buy very cheap things in in the supermarket all made in china of course it also one of the side effects was that it kept wages down in australia so i'm not sure whether overall it was um the way the balance lies but on the on it generally very positive but what i have seen over the the last two three years has been a growing trend against globalization so i'd like just like to mention that because i think our problems with china are not just with arising from china or arising from australia it's a question of kind of mindset of how we see our place in the world what we've seen is that we've put the barriers up we've imposed trade sanctions far more than we used to do um we have um put limits on the number of people coming in you know we will decide who comes and and the circumstances under which they come and we've in a way gone back to that island nation mentality which was what really irked me when i was an undergraduate and led me to take up the study of china you know the everybody should speak english what's happened to our teaching of asian languages at school and in university um it's like we know what's best and we'll rule the world relying on the british imperial traditions that's not the sort of country that i want to live in and and our relations with china are a very important part of the change that needs to be made to some extent i agree with with with kevin that the changes that we have followed have been where we have followed along from the united states because the trump administration also imposed trade tariffs in sparking inflation there covid closed borders europe has imposed economic sanctions especially after russia invaded ukraine and china has been generally regarded as being a global competitor not a trade partner which is how we used to see it so we start to think of ourselves how we could be self-sufficient how we could be more autonomous how we can reduce our dependency i don't think there's a dead end sort of mindset and that's why i signed the letter so the starting point if we're going to do something about china is a fundamental shift in mindset i think we are an island continent but that doesn't mean we can cut ourselves off from the rest of the world we we are intimately connected with our regional neighbors that's why it's so encouraging to see our new foreign minister visiting pacific islands we have also have besides trade ties we have ties with the rest of the world in terms of our history and our culture and the economy and we need to look after those relationships to value them of course there have been a lot of talk about you know we have a pacific family but i don't know about your families but there are family rules about how to to get on with each other and also how to get on with guests and one of my family rules was when people came to um lunch or to tea was called fhb if you you familiar with fhb stands for family hold back if there's not enough to go round fhb you let the guests take what they want first what i mean by this fhb mentality which i think we need with our partnership with other countries is that we don't dictate to them what they should be doing but we share with them whatever little we have we share their pain and we share their sorrow and we share with their achievements and so it should be i think with china of course we have problems some of our our neighbors are not ours by choice but they're there still and we have to get on with them and the way to get on with difficult neighbors is not to pick a fight if you've got a problem that it's best to take it to a non-confrontational international forum if you've got something positive to say then let's say it directly and face to face so now let's sort out the issues and decide which issues we need to discuss directly with china and which we can we can put on the agenda of international bodies thanks jocelyn and and i think when we talk about the shift in mindset this is 50 years since australia um well canberra beijing signed their sign their relationship under golf whitlam and it is interesting how our political leaders do set that mindset um whether you talk about hawk or keating um and and howard maintained an uh asean aipac all these were australian leaders were pushing these these issues and yet um certainly under the morrison government was a very different attitude so the political leaders make a difference but obviously ordinary people and business leaders might make a big difference and james um you are very right at the sake of australian china relations you run the australia china relations institute um what's your view on on on where we are and what you know we're going to have a reset i mean your initial um i think in the conversation seem quite optimistic but um let's see your view sure thanks very much glendon thanks um david goodman and the china study centre for inviting me and thanks everyone for coming um glenda you invited each of us to make some initial remarks about the future trajectory of the australia-china relationship well look let me start with the obvious one of course of course much depends on how china acts right we all know that no one's arguing about that it was beijing the put the trade uh put the trade disruption measures in place back in may 2020 right so of course it's not all just about australia and if beijing's not willing to come to the party well the trajectory is going to look pretty grim right that's one point but the problem with our discussion in australia is that it often just stops there in fact that line kevin that you mentioned china has changed of course it's true but it has got to the stage in australia where it has now been weaponized to deflect any agency or responsibility from australia now i'm happy to call china out and i have on things like cutting off political dialogue on hitting our farmers and our miners threatening our universities happy to do that but don't tell me as an academic i just couldn't live with myself if i pretended spun the narrative which is what's happening in australia today that australia hasn't changed too or that in the face of a change china we should just respond however the hell we like right and that's what i think a lot of people say it's all about china it's not about us right so don't look don't think about any responsibility we hold we don't even have to think about how we respond because it's china that's changed the conversation's not about us and i just think that is a fundamentally dishonest um and it's certainly an unhelpful narrative for australia's national interest i mean let's not talk about it let's talk about china let's talk about australia and a great example of this in fact i'm not sure if anyone read the opinion pages of the australian today you will see a classic example of this exercise in distraction right it's not honest um certainly it's not academically rigorous and i don't think it serves australia's national interest now now i've said some bad things about what beijing did back in 2020 let me tell you a few ways australia has changed we have changed folks i've mapped this with a lot of detail there's two things that even back in 2019 the morrison government did that it stopped doing in 2020 right the first was that into morrison's term first year of morrison's term this is not so long ago he would explicitly couch the differences with china in the context of a broader partnership right so he would say yes we have differences with china we'll protect australia's national interests but we manage those differences in the context of a partnership that we want to keep going 2020 that stopped on the record second point he deliberately put distance between himself his own government's position and that of the trump administration in washington right now no one is talking when kevin says to have an independent foreign policy a bit a more independent foreign policy he's not talking about walking away from the u.s alliance but of course he's not no one is but what morrison did was made it clear someone was watching the chinese embassy in beijing or the foreign sorry the chinese embassy canberra or the foreign ministry in beijing it would have been obvious that canberra's position on china was not the same as the morris it was not the same with the trump position in washington again that has changed right so australia has changed i'll finish off with this remarks glenda and this is why i think we might have some hope not for a reset can i just rule that out straight away but for an improved trajectory which really shouldn't be hard giving that we're coming from a really low base you know this is what these folks who talk about china changing just can't quite bring themselves to admit they can never do it that australia is an outlier in our region right there's plenty of countries in our region that have problems with china and in fact they are far more serious than australia has with china india 20 indian soldiers died in a border dispute with china just last year right so don't give me this line this line oh lots of countries have problems with china yes that's my point too lots of countries do have problems with china but none of them have found themselves in the situation that we are doesn't that kind of hint that yeah china may have changed but maybe maybe we could have handled things a bit differently as well i mean it's pretty bleedingly obvious to me that that's the case so the first thing i think we're going to see glenna is glad is a restoration of diplomacy in canberra don't forget how bad this got folks in march an airliner crashed in southern china killing 132 people did you see the statement from our prime minister or foreign minister no you didn't because we didn't make one right even in that you know could could you think of a more simple development where we could have put out a conservatory remarks no we didn't india did uk did canada did new zealand did we didn't right so we're going to have a government that treats diplomacy seriously again we're going to have a foreign minister who puts dfat back in charge of running the china relationship that doesn't mean she's going to be a soft touch but what it does mean is you're not going to have a defense minister cut running in from the sidelines inserting hysterical random commentary on australia's relationship with china penny wong will run the portfolio that's a good thing and finally i think this election presents an opportunity for both sides to undertake a face-saving step back you know beijing's got to understand that canberra has got a domestic political challenge in managing a change china relationship and i just hope there are enough cool heads in canberra to recognize that beijing 2 has a domestic political challenge that it has to manage to chart a different course in the relationship stop there thank you james um just while we're on on the subject of the election i do want to raise and it was raised about um the role of of chinese voters in in australia um i think six percent of the australian population is either born in china or dates its roots back to chinese origins um i wonder how did the morrison governments i'll start with you kevin how did the morrison government's um anti-china rhetoric did did that play out in the australian electorate in in ways perhaps that morrison might not have expected i mean did this affect the way australians voted uh thanks glenda i i can answer that in two ways one is anecdotally and in my organization i'm the only non-chinese born person and my friends and colleagues have said to me repeatedly over the last 18 months that they feel personally threatened and offended by the anti-china rhetoric now these are not people who are big communist party of china supporters um but what they're doing is they're reflecting the fact that the rhetoric has gotten so out of control that they personally felt that ill at ease and many of these people have been traditional liberal voters after the election some of you may have seen some of the election wrap-up and the analysis um that i saw earlier this week was that in 2019 whenever the last election was something like uh 60 to 70 percent of australian chinese voters voted for the coalition this time around it was 60 to 70 percent voted for labor and i think that says a lot and hopefully our politicians have taken that on board justin do you have any thoughts about that and and also the broad issue of these you know foreign interference laws and how that is playing out in how in academia i mean is it is it causing genuine academic cooperation to to um to be threatened or to be under under pressure i mean there's a lot of sort of subterranean um things that have been happening that perhaps people don't want to talk about publicly but they certainly they're certainly feeling them as well as starting with the election i live in the north sydney electorate and that's now one of the teal representatives and in fact i worked with kylie tink because in that electorate it's not been listed amongst those with the highest proportion of chinese voters but it's quite a significant amount in willoughby local government areas according to their own figures something like 25 of the electorate or the population is ethnic chinese of course they're not all voters um but that just gives you an indication so i think going back to what i said about you know our mindset one of the things that our politicians haven't caught up with is that our society has changed and it was very encouraging i think um albanese used the word multicultural which i haven't heard for for for quite a few years but it's a good indication that the the government will pay more respect to the ethnic population in us in australia now maybe they were liberal voters who switched but i think there's a much more fundamental issue than that because both in the community and i think in universities i've been a little bit out of it and other people may have some of you people in the audience may have more to contribute on that it's very hard to be accepted as an objective commentator these days in what i write published or what in what i saw i advised kylie tink to speak about you get attacked from both sides you get attacked by the 300 presenters you know and you also get attacked by the taiwan independence and the hong kong student demonstration supporters you can't please everyone and it you say to yourself well very all sides are attacking me that must move mean the time i'm right but it's a very uncomfortable position to be in and it has had a very bad effect on the psychology psyche of of particularly of chinese australians i think they don't want to be in the middle they don't they don't like talk of war in particular so let's tone the rhetoric down and and let's accept that you know commentators academics business people can be aware of the difficulties and the problems on both sides can sympathize with the aspirations of hong kong demonstrators and also sympathize with the those people who who lost relatives and friends in the chairman we mark the anniversary tomorrow but you you've still got to speak to to look for truth to try and to use my old professor's um adage he said seeking truth with love i think is a good motto to have thank you thank you and james what would would you want to come in on this issue of the election and perhaps these broader issues of anti-chinese rhetoric that we've had from the top of our government yeah look i think jocelyn is the best person to comment on that i think she has i might just make one comment on academia if that's okay i mean that's that's where i spend my days um yeah the attacks on academics over the last two years who haven't towed the canberra line has just been absolutely extraordinary you know extraordinary i'm not quite sure what sets these people off is it because academics have some expertise that they find threatening or is it because they have independence that they cannot control maybe that feeds into their hysterical reaction but let me just quote from you a sentence this is from a commentary piece in today's australian newspaper right referring to the open letter that 15 academics signed including jocelyn myself interestingly the commentator doesn't disagree with anything we said he can't point anything factually wrong with what the open letter included but this is what he did say quote their letter was published concurrently in english by the xinhua news agency the primary press organ of the chinese communist party these are academics it seems who have better access to beijing than ministers in the outgoing federal government right you're all clear you're all clear on what the message is right jocelyn jocelyn myself are agents of the chinese communist party david goodman who organized the letter worked it so xinhua would concurrently publish the letter at the same time as the letter was published on an australian website lies right but it's not it's just a straight out lie a misrepresentation miss calling it a misrepresentation is too generous right but here we are folks well i can only speak for myself and um thank god uts supports academic freedom i don't have to worry about my job and i do actually care about the uh the rigor of the work i do um so i'm just going to keep talking as i have been okay and while um yeah i mean all of us who do write about china we're um constantly if you look at the comments underneath us a very can be very nasty and i think that defers that deters a lot of people from engaging as much as they as they would like to and and i'm just going to shift the subject now i'll keep with you james um we'll look at a number of threads in the relationship but one is business and interestingly enough because that's sort of the error i've been involved and took lots and lots of business people and a lot of those very actively do business with china there's a very natural complementarity and this is the difference between america we don't compete with china we actually have things that china wants china has things that we want it actually works quite well which is why we have a trade surplus and other countries don't um a lot of people in business uh want a much better relationship with china and they have been afraid to um to speak out and it was interesting that dutton when he was elected as head of the liberal party was attacking business so i i the liberal party and business are a little bit out of tune but um there is this thing even business leaders have been afraid to to make comments about china even to say let's uh let's improve things let's see if we can tone down the rhetoric but but james on this australia china business relationship the interesting thing is despite all these declining political relationships the fundamentally people on both sides seem to want to do business with each other um despite all sorts of other um political pressures so i mean what are you seeing and then i'll come to you kevin yeah yeah so i think we need to be careful in not exaggerating the extent to which geopolitical differences spill over to hurt economic links i mean just the fact is again sorry to keep coming back to facts i know it's not a popular thing to do in the australia china discussion but last year two-way trade between australia and china hit a record high now i'm not saying everything was rosy partly that was a good part of it actually was to do with extremely high iron oil prices but the trend the disruption affecting wine cotton barley and so on that's all real i'm not denying it but two-way trade still remains at a record high there's fundamental reasons for that the ones you mentioned those complementarities and other economic basics like purchasing power i mean china has is the country that has the purchasing power to pay for australian goods and services so not surprisingly our businesses are keen on sending it there and the other thing glenda i sometimes see our business community again misrepresented it's it's pretty disgraceful stuff as though if a company has an exposure to china then somehow they are compromised or opening australia up to risk well no i mean this this line where you have an exposure to china and that leads one to one to risk is just really i mean that's like two-year-old analysis take out cotton growers right back in 2020 they had three quarters of their output exports going to china three quarters right big exposure right so people say well they're either stupid right they don't understand china or they're not taking the risk seriously well guess what beijing closed the door right so the scenario that they were warned about unfolded what happened overnight redirected their output to other markets they suffered virtually no losses at all why is that because cotton growers understood full well that their product is traded in competitive global markets and it turns out they knew competitive global markets are actually a really really effective risk mitigation mechanism now unfortunately some of our security folks in canberra don't actually understand global markets it's business folks who actually understand those mitigation mechanisms far better than many of our commentators do so let's treat economic risks from exposure to china seriously but gosh we've got to do better than this conversation we've been having so far and it's interesting with the company penfolds which is owned by treasury wine estate penfolds well treasury wine estate before the tariffs was the biggest single um foreign supplier of of well sorry australia was the biggest single supplier of foreign wine in china um the growing chinese middle class loved australian wine and they loved the pinfalls brand and it's interesting that treasury wine estate is still very committed to china and they are now making pinfalls in um in napa valley and also in europe and exporting it into china the head of penfolds which is a huge global rent is still based in shanghai so that company is still very much committed to the china market and i think you know they're hoping maybe things um might improve but they're looking at other ways to engage with with china now kevin what are you seeing on the business because business and trade is a very important part of the relationship and it's very real and as i've said the complementarities there but what are you seeing as a view in the business community and is this a grounds for hope or um is it going to be complicated well thank you clinton and i agree with everything that james said i think that in short uh the route for business continues to be very optimistic and and positive uh one of the things that has noticeably been absent in the so-called security discussion over the last three years vis-a-vis china is that economics are also part of our security and uh we have become very wealthy uh as a country uh we've be we've developed world-class industries often on the back of our trade and investment relationship with china this has been a significant factor in the creation of our own economic security and this one-dimensional view that i've seen from canberra over the last few years seems to take that for granted or ignore it one or the other as a business person i've always said that when the bilateral relationship is good conducting business with china is like doing work in the sunshine everyone's happy everyone's willing to talk about their activities um share experiences build the common knowledge and and prosperity when the bilateral relationship is bad it's like doing business in the shadows and i think we've seen in my contemporaries in the business community even if they've had large operations in china very significant investments in china they don't talk about it because as james said before if you become associated with china somehow there's been this taint this question about whether that's the right thing whose side are you on and so business leaders individually have been pretty much reluctant to talk about their activities you've had very capable and vocal spokespeople like david olson from the australia china business council and mark smith from the business council of australia who have tried to bring the discussion back into some more balanced uh place and those people will continue that process it's probably one of the reasons why we haven't suffered more than we have over uh the last two or three years one area that we have suffered and it may take a long time to recover is chinese investment in australia has just dropped off a cliff and so they went from being one of our largest if not the largest uh foreign investor in australia in just a few short years to to virtually investing nothing and there's no trajectory upward in that as i traveled around china after the uh chenelco rio tinto debacle in 2009 even five years later as i met with chinese business people they'd say ah australia doesn't want chinese investment and based on that one episode there was this image created in china that that australia was not welcome and it took many many years for that attitude that perception to be changed i'm afraid it's going to take many years for us to recover from this downturn and we will suffer we're a country built on foreign investment we don't have the capital ourselves to develop our industries the way we need to and as you said china is a a good partner in our complementary needs jocelyn i know you're not a business expert but your foreign affairs expert i just um i just want to change the subject a little bit um what does it mean what people have talked about under the morrison government that foreign affairs was their role was reduced their voice was diminished do you feel what does that how does that affect the government policy do you feel that foreign affairs under penny wong will play a in terms of the actual diplomats will play more of a role and just on the other side what role when we've seen this new chinese ambassador mr xiao very experienced he's come from indonesia he's come with some different rhetoric but what difference can can he make as well yeah well let's start with with the new ambassador i think that is you could say that what he has said is nothing really out of the ordinary you would expect um that he would uh make a a a statement to the press particularly when the press is so interested in in our relations with china but it's the tone i think of of his way of speaking that we should note and i really think was very much struck by by morrison not seeing him i mean that's a standard courtesy for the appointment of a new ambassador that he would make high-level calls it was a deliberate snub to him so it was quite clear that china relations were being weaponized by the previous government let us hope that the new government is able to deal with the relations in a more rational way i also know that you know chinese government sets a great store on anniversaries um we had in the past big uh celebrations observing the 20th anniversary the 30th anniversary and now 40th anniversary now we're coming up to 50th anniversary of of relations and the ministry of foreign affairs i think one of their roles is to make sure that these anniversaries are observed um within the chinese government of course the ministry of foreign affairs is not of the most powerful ministry so you can we shouldn't take necessarily this request you know that we resolve all the issues and start planning a big celebration in december as being a statement from the highest level of chinese government but it's certainly the objective of the ministry and of the embassy and the consulate here and it provides an opportunity for us to respond in a measured and way and hopefully to um some you said you don't like the word reset but but recalibrate perhaps our relationship and also it also provides an opportunity to look back on what we have achieved over 50 years because we've really come a very long way see just reminiscing i was in beijing on the day that the establishment of diplomatic relations was announced i was there with the delegation from this university the university of sydney we sent a cable from the peking hotel to the new prime minister goff whitlam congratulating him and signed it the australians in china wow so with it was a very difficult time to be there it was the end of the cultural revolution uh contacts with um academics and and were very very limited there were parties representatives in on every conversation we had there was absolutely no conversation was permitted with any ordinary members of the community people on the street not allowed to communicate with foreigners but still we managed to do it even in that cold war period so surely we can do it again 50 years later james you've got i think next week or the week after you're hosting the chinese ambassador at akri and you've you've met him um you know on his side is that does can that make a difference i think in the new chinese ambassador you have as justin said an experienced diplomat who is doing all that he can um you know i know there's a lot of quick commentary in australia to say well you know if it was serious why hasn't he told back beijing to roll back the trade punishments let the australians detained in china chiang mai yang heng-jun let them go free well you know that would be good but i'm not sure that's actually in the ambassador's capacity to be able to pull that one off but look here's what he said just yesterday glenn a quote again i'm ready to quote i'm ready to compare notes and see what we can do together close quote so i think the way this is going to start it's going to be modest and what you'll have is a frank discussion between the new chinese ambassador and the foreign minister penny wong and then we're going to build from that don't forget that political trust on both sides has just been absolutely shattered over the last few years right so both sides are petrified of being of of unilaterally making a concession that the other side then uses to uh you know to weaponize and bolt them back right so it's going to be modest but i think that initial conversations between penny wong and the ambassador um you've got a starting point and from there i think you'll see both sides doing you know subtle diplomatic signaling um and then we chart a gradual trajectory forward um but you know we're not going back to 2015. thank you james and thanks very much to the china studies centre for hosting this and thank you very much you

Channel: China Studies Centre

Views: 63,932

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Id: ONia_bW_ZMY

Length: 51min 52sec (3112 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 16 2022