So what did Andrew Hastie actually say about (what a wide
range of ill-informed pundits in Australia claim) was a comparison of China with Nazi
Germany? Well the reality is less dramatic than the version of those who place
trade with China higher than the American alliance.
Andrew Hastie is Federal Member for [like a Congressman for a Federal District of] Canning
in Western Australia. More importantly Hastie is Chair of the Parliamentary Joint
Committee for Intelligence and Security in Canberra. See the right sidebar for some details about the Committee.
But the actual text of what he wrote is most important.
Here it is below:
“We must
see China - the opportunities and the threats - with clear eyes
By Andrew Hastie [federal member
for [like a Congressman for a Federal District of] Canning [Western Australia] and the chair of the
parliamentary joint committee for intelligence and security.]
Like many people across the world, I saw 9/11 as the geopolitical moment that
would shape the 21st century. It shaped the next decade of my own life. But I
was wrong.
The most significant geopolitical moment of the
21st century had already happened, five months earlier. And most of us,
distracted by more dramatic events, failed to see it. It came on April Fool’s
Day, 2001.
A J-8 fighter jet from the People’s Liberation Army
Navy collided with a US Navy EP-3 signals intelligence aircraft, 70 kilometres
off the coast of Hainan Island. Both planes began plummeting toward the South
China Sea. The PLAN fighter pilot did not survive. The 24 crew of the badly
damaged US EP-3 managed a hard landing on the island, and, after being offered
water and cigarettes, were held for 11 days by the Chinese government.
The crew was released to the US, but the aircraft
was returned much later – in many small pieces – via a Russian Antonov cargo
plane. This was an early test for the Bush administration, only 10 weeks old.
It was faced with brinkmanship, intelligence plundering and technology
transfer.
All this took place over what are now contested
waters — where today the PLAN has forged unsinkable aircraft carriers, out of
reefs and atolls.
The Hainan Island incident laid down the contours
for the present challenge facing Australia. It portended the agonising security
and economic balancing act we must now perform. That clash, almost 20 years
ago, has now grown into overt geopolitical rivalry across the Indo-Pacific. The
US seeks to remain the dominant power in the region and the People's Republic
of China works to supplant it.
Australia must now, somehow, hold on to our
sovereignty and prosperity. We must balance security and trade. But most
importantly, we must remain true to our democratic convictions while also
seeing the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.
This will be immensely difficult. It is impossible
to forsake the US, our closest security and investment partner. It is also
impossible to disengage from China, our largest trading partner. This is the
central point: almost every strategic and economic question facing Australia in
the coming decades will be refracted through the geopolitical competition of
the US and the PRC.
The US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, made that
much abundantly clear when he said "the world has been asleep at the
switch".
We must be clear-eyed about our position in the
world. We are resetting the terms of engagement with China to preserve our
sovereignty, security and democratic convictions, as we also reap the benefits
of prosperity that come with our mutually beneficial trade relationship.
Last year, the Coalition government secured
bipartisan passage of laws countering espionage, foreign interference and
influence. Tough decisions were made on our future 5G network to safeguard our
digital sovereignty for the generations to come. Critical assets, such as ports
and gas pipelines, are now monitored much more closely, in recognition of their
importance to our national life together.
But there is more to be done. Right now our
greatest vulnerability lies not in our infrastructure, but in our thinking.
That intellectual failure makes us institutionally weak. If we don’t understand
the challenge ahead for our civil society, in our parliaments, in our
universities, in our private enterprises, in our charities — our little
platoons — then choices will be made for us. Our sovereignty, our freedoms,
will be diminished.
[The following paragraph is the alleged Nazi Germany bit]
The West once believed that economic liberalisation
would naturally lead to democratisation in China. This was our Maginot Line. It
would keep us safe, just as the French believed their series of steel and
concrete forts would guard them against the German advance in 1940. But their
thinking failed catastrophically. The French had failed to appreciate the
evolution of mobile warfare. Like the French, Australia has failed to see how
mobile our authoritarian neighbour has become.
Even worse, we ignore the role that ideology plays
in China's actions across the Indo-Pacific region. We keep using our own
categories to understand its actions, such as its motivations for building
ports and roads, rather than those used by the Chinese Communist Party.
The West has made this mistake before. Commentators
once believed Stalin’s decisions were the rational actions of a realist great
power. But the Princeton Professor of History, Stephen Kotkin, found otherwise,
after years of sifting through the archives of top Soviet meetings. He
discovered that Stalin and his advisers “said the same things as they said in
their propaganda … [using] all the Marxian categories, because it turns out the
Communists were Communists! They believed in the ideas and it’s only by taking
the ideas and politics seriously, can you understand the phenomenon.”
We must be intellectually honest and take the
Chinese leadership at its word. We are dealing with a fundamentally different
vision for the world. Xi Jinping has made his vision of the future abundantly
clear since becoming President in 2013. His speeches show that the tough
choices ahead will be shaped, at least on the PRC side, by ideology – communist
ideology, or in his words, by "Marxist-Leninism and Mao Zedong
Thought".
Xi’s view of the future is one where capitalism
will be eclipsed and "the consolidation of and development of the
socialist system will require its own long period of history … it will require
the tireless struggle of generations, up to 10 generations".
With history as our guide, we have no reason to
doubt President Xi Jinping. Our next step in safeguarding Australia’s future is
accepting and adapting to the reality of the geopolitical struggle before us –
its origins, its ideas and its implications for the Indo-Pacific region.
The next decade will test our democratic values,
our economy, our alliances and our security like no other time in Australian
history.
Andrew Hastie is the
federal member for Canning and the chair of the parliamentary joint committee
for intelligence and security.”
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