Foreign powers gaslighting our nation into war

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Lead Editorial

27 April 2022
Vol. 24 No. 17

If this election is in any way reflective of the Australian people, then we are losing our collective minds over China, talking ourselves into a war of annihilation that will be of our own making.

The insane comments of Scott Morrison, Peter Dutton, and Penny Wong about the Solomon Islands demonstrate that the major parties see votes in being prepared to declare war on our major trading partner.

Scott Morrison called a Chinese military base in the Solomons—which is not on the cards—a “red line” for Australia. Why? He didn’t cite a sovereign Australian reason, only that we share the USA’s “red line”.

He was followed up by Australia’s Darth Vader-withouta-helmet, Peter Dutton, who ranted on ANZAC Day: “The Chinese, through their actions, through their words, are on a very deliberate course at the moment, and we have to stand up with countries to stare down any act of aggression.... The only way you can preserve peace is to prepare for war, and be strong as a country.”

To score electoral points against Morrison in this so-called “khaki election” climate, Labor has dropped all perspective and any measured language to hype the threat even more, so the Solomons is seen as Morrison’s failure. ALP foreign affairs spokesperson Penny Wong said on 26 April: “The prospect of a Chinese base less than 2,000km from Australia’s coastline is dramatically detrimental to Australia’s security interests.”

Later that day, Channel 10’s The Project host Waleed Aly asked Labor’s Kristina Kenneally: “The US in the middle of last year announced a new military base in the Federated States of Micronesia. They are planning to extend compacts that they have with three different North Pacific states to allow for free military movement across those countries and include military installations. And looking at that, China would probably understandably say ‘well hang on, if you’re going to up your presence, we’re going to up ours’. Do you hold the view that America is the only country in the world that is entitled to establish a military presence across a region like this?” Kenneally choked on her answer, stammering that “China doesn’t share our democratic values”.

How has it come to this?

Up until 2018-19, the leading politicians in both major parties were enthusiastic in their dealings with China, our biggest and best trading partner. Australia enjoys a $70 billion or so annual trade surplus with China, which is our nation’s profit; by contrast, we have a $30 billion or so trade deficit with the USA—a net drain on our wealth.

Deputy Labor leader Richard Marles is being attacked for a 2017 speech he gave in China, in which he praised, rightly, the “really significant contribution that China is making to humanity, which as I described, is the single biggest alleviation of poverty in human history”. But on 26 June 2019 PM Scott Morrison also praised China, declaring that “Australia welcomes the contribution that the Belt and Road Initiative can make to regional infrastructure investment and to regional development.”

What changed? Not China, and not Australia’s national interest. Rather, it was the strategic agenda of our Anglo-American allies, our “dangerous allies” as Malcolm Fraser called them, who decided China’s economic success is a strategic threat to their global hegemony. As the AAS documented in its 2020 “China narrative” series, those foreign powers, using the Five Eyes intelligence agencies including ASIO, and associated politicians and journalists, proceeded to “gaslight” Australians—convincing us we’re out of our minds to cooperate with China—using hyped disinformation and lies to convince us that everything Chinese is a mortal threat. It worked. Now our politicians have given up any pretext of sovereignty to march in lockstep with this Anglo-American war agenda—to the point of seeing votes in hyping war!

Snap out of it Australians, before it’s too late! Support the Citizens Party’s urgent fight for an independent foreign policy. Watch the 28 April YouTube livestream.

In this issue:

• Licensed post offices call for a public post office bank
• Insurance Code is another regulatory mirage
• ASPI trades Iraq War criminal for new-age techno-spook
• The human cost of maintaining the rules-based order
• Rules-based order lays siege to food production
• Indonesia aspires to become a modern industrial nation
• Mexico nationalises lithium mining
• How can the US housing crisis be solved?
• New documents show depth of Saudi 9/11 role
• Citizens Party’s ‘fantastic polices’ polarise the political field
• John Howard’s ideological scam in 1978 that gouges Australian drivers to this day
• ALMANAC: ‘Toward a New International Security and Development Architecture’
• Russian Ambassador recalls joint fight against Nazism in World War II
• Prof. Justin Yifu Lin: modernisation through infrastructure development

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