Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

The sixth—I'm corrected—to have this motion progress. Senator Patrick, I can only guess, must feel like he's on the set of Groundhog Day. And on each of those occasions, the Liberal and Labor parties have joined to defeat all five of his previous attempts. I wonder if it's because Liberal Andrew Robb, when he retired, received an $880,000 salary after selling the lease to the Port of Darwin? Or after Sam Dastyari's bills were paid by the Chinese, or after Liberal Gladys Liu's contradictions of fact about her associations with China that were never resolved, or about Labor's ICAC revelations in New South Wales? We keep seeing Liberal and Labor come together to defeat even looking at this very vital and important relationship.

It is imperative that Australia and China maintain a mutually respectful and beneficial bilateral relationship. China is Australia's largest two-way trading partner in exports and imports, representing 24 per cent of total trade and with a value of $183 billion. That alone shows significant influence on Australia. Australia is China's sixth-largest trading partner and fifth-biggest supplier of imports. Twenty-five per cent of Australia's manufactured imports come from China. Thermal coal represents 13 per cent of all Australian exports to China and, recently, they tried to blackmail us about that.

In more recent times, China has embarked on the 'one belt, one road' initiative. This is a Chinese government economic and strategic agenda, where Eurasia, Africa and Oceania are more closely tied along two routes: one land and one maritime. It is intended to facilitate Chinese economic and strategic domination of smaller countries along the route—indeed, Chinese control. For Australia, we see the growing Chinese involvement in projects from northern Australia right through to Tassie, all providing little benefit to Australia and yet substantial benefits to China. We need to understand this relationship; we don't just let them have an open door.

Other examples of Chinese involvement have been in the funding and support of local academic conferences and seminars. The negative aspects of the Confucius Institute are only just being realised as some universities remove them from their offerings. Australia has been a destination of choice for many Chinese students, to further their education in an Australian academic institution. It's important to our economy. In 2018 there were more than 166,000 enrolments of Chinese students in Australia, representing 43.3 per cent of the total international student cohort—heading for half. A concern noted in some Australian universities is the potential dependence generated by full-fee-paying international students on the overall money pool available to university budgets. Should those numbers suddenly diminish it may leave some of our universities destitute and many university staff unpaid. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, these concerns have come to fruition and Australian universities are bleeding financially. To make matters worse, the Chinese government has just warned Chinese students not to study or return to study in Australia, suggesting that they would face discriminatory attacks.

Australia has been a favourite destination for Chinese tourists, and this is shown again by recent numbers. More than 1.3 million Chinese tourists visited Australia last year, representing 15 per cent of our total visitors—one seventh. This is a clear positive for Australia. At the same time, there has been a growing boom in Australian tourists—around 700,000—heading for China. This may also change rapidly, as the Chinese government has recently warned off Chinese tourists from visiting our country through recent directives to their people.

One of the ongoing issues of concern relates to regional and global security. The growing tensions between the United States of America and the People's Republic of China in the imposition of trade tariffs is placing Australia in a challenging position, given the importance of Australia's relationships with both countries. More recently, the Chinese government has imposed an 80 per cent tariff on Australian barley, without explanation, and has refused to accept meat from four of Australia's major meat abattoirs, causing concern to Australian producers.

These actions by the Chinese government appear to be in retaliation for being called on by Australia to allow an independent investigation into the cause of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China—what I have referred to as the Chinese Communist Party virus and the UN virus. How dare we want an independent investigation? The Chinese, still denying being the source of the outbreak of the worldwide pandemic, remain uncooperative in dealing with this, just as Liberal and Labor remain uncooperative in dealing with any inquiry into our relationship with China.

Chinese actions and/or inaction certainly made the pandemic far worse than it could have been. The behaviour of China is responsible for the loss of tens of thousands of lives—in fact, hundreds of thousands of lives. The views taken of China's growing military influence in the South China Sea remain of concern to our most important ally, the United States of America, and are therefore necessarily of concern to our country as an established ally of the US.

Regionally, China is having a growing influence through infrastructure projects for some of the Pacific island countries and our very near neighbour, Papua New Guinea, just over the horizon from Australia. This runs the risk of changing the whole dynamic between Australia and our near neighbours. Given the potential for military and strategic use of these bases by China and the potential for resource extraction at some future time, we need to consider this factor when examining our relationship with China. We already feel this at home, with the outrageous decision to lease the Darwin Port—our strategic northern gateway to China—for 99 years. This is the home of our local naval presence. What on earth was the government thinking? I point to Mr Dutton, Mr Hastie and Senator Kitching, who have raised valid concerns—both Liberal and Labor MPs and senators—just as Senator Patrick mentioned. This was reported on 11 October 2019 of Mr Dutton:

One of the Morrison Government's most senior figures has taken a direct swipe at Beijing, accusing the Chinese Communist Party of behaving in ways that are "inconsistent" with Australian values.

One of the key points that emerged was that:

Well, let's see an inquiry. The report continued:

He said he wanted universities to be free from foreign interference.

So let's see an inquiry into that foreign interference that Mr Dutton acknowledges.

The home affairs minister—a very powerful, senior minister—also criticised China's Belt and Road Initiative and defended a ban on using Huawei to help build Australia's 5G network. The newspaper article also says:

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton warned Australia would "call out" foreign interference in universities, as well as cyber hacks and theft of intellectual property (IP), insisting it was the right thing to do. It represents some of the strongest language yet from a Federal Government minister on the threat posed by China.

But we need more than language. We need more than inferences. We need an inquiry into the relationship. The Chinese Communist Party behaves in ways that are inconsistent with Australian values and Western civilisation.

Recently in Queensland, my home state, a university student was suspended for daring to make pro-democracy statements about the suppression of students and demonstrators in Hong Kong by the Chinese government. The University of Queensland appears now to be an agent of the Chinese government, which seems to have bought out this Australian university and to have been enabled by the university to oppress an Australian student for standing up for democracy.

When I get to the point of quoting Clive Hamilton, then we know things are serious, because Clive Hamilton, to his credit, has written a book calling out the issues that we have with China—raising serious threats and concerns to our country and our country's security.

My issue, I must make clear, is not with the marvellous Chinese people, including the amazing Chinese community we have here in Australia. We had Chinese influence in North Queensland through the gold rushes in the 19th century right through to the southern and western parts of our country, and they have made a marvellous contribution. My issue is with the Communist Party of China and their policies that are inconsistent with our own values. They have undue influence in Australian politics, values, communities and way of life.

Human rights is an area where China and Australia have vastly different views. Australia is a democracy and a signatory to many international agreements that preserve basic human rights. China is a republic following a communist regime that is very rigid. It is a controlling machine with little room to question the state and with limited rights for the individual. Watch the demonstrations for freedom happening in Hong Kong to see how that goes down. Many Australians remember the appalling and tragic events at Tiananmen Square where many people's lives were sacrificed in the name of democracy. Our Prime Minister cried over that and understandably so, yet we can't even have an inquiry into our relationship with China. Tiananmen Square was not merely an incident, as recently reported in the media; it was one of the earliest signs to the West of China's serial breaching of human rights and the suppression of their own people in China. The detention of those whose views differ from the regime's is a continuing disgrace and worthy of further review.

The government and Labor have sold out Australia's inheritance. No wonder they don't want us to have a review of this potentially catastrophic relationship. Will the Liberal Party and the Labor Party—will the Lib-Lab duopoly—look beyond the Chinese donations to their parties and do the right thing by our country? These actions by China would appear to threaten the relationship of mutual respect between the two countries and are worthy of inquiry. The actions of Lib-Lab MPs and governments handing control of essential services—like our electricity, for goodness sake; our ports; our food producers—to the Chinese Communist Party, is insane. Why are we doing it and why aren't we bothering to look into it? These deals threaten our honesty, fairness, humanity and our national security. One Nation supports the call for an inquiry into a nation exerting powerful influences over our nation with potentially far more powerful influences on our nation's future and on our people's security.