China and AUKUS
Turnbull on submarines and Morrison
The Morrison government’s announcement of the AUKUS deal was rich in hype and poor in explanation. In his address to the National Press Club on Wednesday Malcolm Turnbull’s first point is to explain what really was (or wasn’t) involved:
With the swirl of media soundbites, the impression has been created that the Australian Government has replaced a diesel electric French designed submarine for a nuclear powered American, or British, one. This is not the case.
Australia now has no new submarine programme at all. We have cancelled the one we had with France and have a statement of intent with the UK and the US to examine the prospect of acquiring nuclear powered submarines.
He goes on to explain the differences between the nuclear-powered submarines in the AUKUS deal and the nuclear-powered submarines we could have purchased from France, and some of the impracticalities in the AUKUS idea of operating our submarines with weapons-grade uranium.
The part of his speech on which the media has focussed, however, is his assessment of Morrison’s behaviour:
Mr Morrison has not acted in good faith. He deliberately deceived France. He makes no defense of his conduct other than to say it was in Australia’s national interest. So, is that Mr Morrison’s ethical standard with which Australia is now tagged: Australia will act honestly unless it is judged in our national interest to deceive?
Out of context, that reads and sounds like a complaint against the people who displaced him in the 2018 right-wing putsch, but if one reads Turnbull’s speech – a transcript is on his website – it’s a well-supported assessment. The media may call it extraordinary, but it’s no more extraordinary than a supervisor’s assessment of an incompetent and dishonest worker.
The transcript does not cover the question and answer session: that starts at 26 minutes of the iview recording. Turnbull’s recurring message in responses to questioners is about trust. It’s not just about Morrison’s untrustworthiness, it’s about the nation’s damaged trustworthiness: “Throwing your reputation for being trustworthy away is a terrible, terrible mistake.”
There may be an opportunity for a future government to back out of AUKUS and re-establish a deal with the French more in line with our defence and security interests, but Morrison’s ineptitude and deceit have done tremendous damage to our capacity to develop trusting relations with any country. He is also concerned about the safety of using weapons-grade uranium as a fuel source: “We are literally walking into the most potentially dangerous form of nuclear naval propulsion at a time when we have no civil, let alone naval, nuclear expertise in Australia”.
Questions about AUKUS are interspersed with are a few cheeky questions about Turnbull’s political intentions. Then at about 50 minutes there is a discussion on climate change, and at 57 minutes the question of vaccination, particularly for indigenous Australians, is raised. He concludes by stating his attention to go to Glasgow, regardless of what Morrison does.
China and the US in context
“China has been around for 5000 years. The United States has been around for 250 years. And it’s not surprising that a juvenile like the United States would have difficulty dealing with a wiser, older civilization.”
That’s the start of a short article, originally published in Newsweek, by Kishore Mahbubani: The US must approach China with humility. The world is returning to a long-established order in which the two largest economies of the world have been India and China. That doesn’t mean China is threatening America, however. China has a stake in a prosperous America, and maintenance of the rules-based order, created by the West, is in China’s interests.
The same website has a link to an hour-long debate between Kishore Mahbubani and author Gordon Chang on the question “Is China an enemy or friend”. Chang sees China as a threat to America and provides examples of recent Chinese actions hostile to American interests, but it’s apparent that Mahbubani and Chang are looking at the issue from very different perspectives, particularly in relation to their time-frames.
Where are Xi and the Communist Party taking China?
Last week’s A foreign affair segment on Saturday Extra was devoted entirely to China, in an analysis of the directions in which China is now heading. The first half of the 28-minute segment is an interview with Kevin Rudd, who sees China turning to the left in economics with more emphasis on sharing the benefits of economic growth, to the left politically in a re-assertion of the Party’s Marxist-Leninist basis, and to the right in terms of a re-asserted nationalism and a quest for greater self-reliance. He goes into the detail of these re-orientations and he comments on the risks faced by the country if it cannot achieve a promised shared prosperity. He makes only passing reference to fault-lines in China’s financial system which have been exposed in the Evergrande troubles.
The other half of the session is essentially a comment on Rudd’s analysis, by Yun Jiang of the China Policy Centre, and Chris Buckley of the New York Times. Buckley goes into details of China’s economic re-structuring towards more high-technology industries in which China may be able to occupy the commanding heights. Yun Jiang sees some of the shift as a conservative move, in a re-assertion of traditional “family values”.