The Winter Olympics does not normally generate a lot of hype in Australia but there is even less than normal chatter about the latest games due to start this week.
That is because this year’s Winter Olympics are in China, an increasingly pariah state from the rest of the world.
Australia will send no official delegation to China because of the Communist Party’s continued human rights abuses against the Uyghur peoples. The US, UK and Canada have also joined this diplomatic boycott.
China is desperately trying to present a positive image through western media. Foreign agent reporting in the US revealed that the Chinese Government is paying for social media influencers to post “positive outcomes” from the Games. China has spent $170 million on propaganda and lobbying in the US since 2016.
A generation ago there was a hope that the integration of China into the world’s economy would see it become more liberal and more democratic. The dream was that China would become more like Hong Kong.
That dream has turned out to be wishful thinking. Hong Kong has become more like China. However, still there remains useful idiots among us that remain blind to the threat China poses to our society and way of life. Most of this naivety seems to come from the Labor party.
Former Labor Prime Minster, Paul Keating, last month called the UK Foreign Secretary “demented” when she raised concerns that China could exploit tensions around the Ukraine to expand its aggression in our region. Last week at the National Press Club, Anthony Albanese praised China for producing “a great economic achievement, the likes of which we haven’t seen, ever, in human history.”
Mr Albanese failed to mention that China’s “economic achievement” has been built on stealing Australian jobs through its continuing abuse of international trade rules. China continues to support its own industries in defiance of the obligations it signed up to in joining the World Trade Organisation.
China’s conduct has crippled manufacturing industries in western countries including in Australia. Australia is now a net importer of steel (mostly from China) despite the fact that we are the world’s largest exporter of iron ore and coking coal.
The Labor party will not provide a strong defence of Australia and Australian industry to the rising threat of China’s economic coercion. Over the past year China has banned Australian beef, coal, barley, wine and lobsters, partly in response to the Australian Government making the reasonable request that China allow an independent investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Labor politicians often spent more time criticising the Federal Government for making this request than they have criticising China for its illegal sanctions on Australian businesses and jobs.
The Labor party wants to put a new climate tax on what’s left of Australian manufacturing. The aluminium smelter, alumina refineries, cement plant, magnesium plant and chemical plant in Gladstone and Rockhampton would all be taxed under Labor’s policy.
The great Chinese General Sun Tzu once wrote “To fight and conquer in all our battles is not supreme excellence. Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.”
China has lured many in the west to give up without a fight through the temptations of cheap TVs and solar panels, often manufactured by slave Uyghur labour in Xinjiang. Our jobs and our way of life is worth the fight and we deserve a Government that will fight for it.
