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Even Chinese island-pumping in the South China Sea does not represent a military threat to Australia, unwise on China’s part, as I believe it to be. Hong Kong and its affairs do not and cannot be represented as some military threat to Australia – an event that requires from us consideration of a military response. Chinese tariffs on wine or seafood do not constitute a military threat any more than does China’s intolerance of Hong Kong domestic political management.
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The word “threat” explicitly connotes military aggression or invasion, a threat China has never made against Australia or even implied making. A threat that, in fact, has never been made and that has never materialised.
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As though China, through its more abrupt and ruder foreign policy, has also presented a military threat in its dealings with Australia. This change in China’s domestic and foreign posture is labelled by Morrison and his government not as the shifting posture of a re-emerging great power, but as “the China threat”. That change is China’s more aggressive international posture – the posture of now, the world’s largest emerging economy. And all in the claim of a so-called “changed security environment”. And now, Morrison, a younger throwback to the Liberals’ Anglosphere, shops Australia’s sovereignty by locking the country and its military forces into the force structure of the United States by acquiring US submarines. Howard, another US appeaser extraordinaire, committed us to an illegal war in Iraq with tragic consequences. Menzies, even after World War II, did Britain’s bidding against the international community in attempting to wrest the Suez Canal from Egypt just as he deceptively committed Australian troops to Vietnam to appease the United States. Paul Keating, writing in Fairfax The Liberals, having no faith in the capacity of Australians and all we have created here, could not resist falling back, yet again, to do the bidding of another great power, the United States of America.