Five decades ago, almost to the day, Gough Whitlam raised a brimming glass to the party chairman Mao Zedong and the Chinese premier Zhou En-lai after delivering a speech at a welcome banquet at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.
This story might be new to you, so let’s step through the history. Whitlam went to China in 1971, while he was still opposition leader – ahead of Richard Nixon’s groundbreaking official visit in 1972. Completely unaware of Nixon’s impending diplomatic overture, the then Australian prime minister Bill McMahon puffed up like a cold war warrior. McMahon declared Zhou had played Whitlam “like a trout”.
After the US plan became known, the deputy Labor leader Lance Barnard offered a droll summation of events. Whitlam wasn’t a trout. But McMahon was “a stunned mullet”. A little over a year later, the stunned mullet was swept from office. Whitlam became the first Labor prime minister since 1949. He returned to China in 1973.
Seminal moments are invoked too frequently in political columns – often without just cause. But Whitlam’s visit to China was a seminal moment. The first visit to China by an Australian prime minister presaged a more independent foreign policy, and it reflected Whitlam’s judgment about where Australia’s future lay, both geographically and economically.
During a toast to his Chinese hosts in late October 1973, Whitlam said he believed there were “great benefits for all in putting aside the rigidities and animosities of the cold war era and grasping the opportunities inherent in the more open framework of relationships now developing in the world, to build a structure of cooperation based on mutual respect and mutual trust”.
Australia now looked to China as a fellow middle power. “At a time when profound changes are taking place in the patterns of international relations, it is particularly important that the role of small and medium powers should be understood and appreciated … they should seize the opportunities for greater independence which the increased fluidity of the world situation presents to them.” Post-colonial Australia was also seeking its place in the region. Whitlam said he was looking to forge regional relationships “of equality”.
Roll ahead 50 years, and the terrain has shifted significantly. The “world situation” (as Whitlam would have it) lies somewhere between fluid and dangerous. In policy terms, successive governments – Labor and Liberal – have pursued Whitlam’s vision, seeking security and prosperity for Australia in Asia. China is now a massive export market for Australian iron ore, gas and minerals.
But China is no longer a middle power. It is the rising regional hegemon, repressive at home and aggressive internationally. The backdrop to our volatile age is vigorous strategic competition between China and the US; a pitched battle for geopolitical supremacy in the Indo-Pacific, which has been likened to a new cold war.
Back in 1973, Whitlam had the opportunity to catch the dragon’s tail; to seek and shape something new. This conflict has been so omnipresent, most Australians know the backstory. The rising regional superpower, China, has sought to expand its influence, overtly and covertly. Understanding China’s step-change, Australia has sought to shore up national sovereignty and security, embarking on a sequence of policy actions that displeased Beijing.
Feeling thwarted, provoked and, at some points, publicly humiliated, Xi Jinping’s authoritarian regime has subjected Australia to a campaign of economic coercion. The bilateral chest bump has been protracted and noisy enough to attract the attention of the world; an escalating dispute over values was supercharged by China’s abrasive “wolf warrior” diplomacy and by reckless partisan politicking from Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton in the run-up to the 2022 federal election.
Two examples recap the dynamic. Remember the time Zhao Lijian, one of China’s high-profile “wolf warrior” diplomats, shared a fake image of an Australian soldier slitting the throat of an Afghan boy, an inflammatory reference to the Brereton inquiry into alleged war crimes by Australian special forces soldiers? Remember, too, those scenes in the parliament when Morrison branded Labor’s deputy leader, Richard Marles, a “Manchurian candidate”? This McCarthyist rhetoric was reckless enough to prompt Australia’s domestic spy chief, Mike Burgess, to declare publicly weaponisation of national security was “not helpful to us.”
We’ve reached a juncture where rapprochement is now considered a mutually agreeable course of action. De-escalation has played out in increments over the past 12 months. Anthony Albanese’s objective over the next few days, diplomatically, is defrost and reboot while asserting Australian values and priorities. Australian officials say it is impossible to go back to where the relationship was in 2016. The next phase of Australia-China relations will be something new.
This finely calibrated diplomatic exercise is being conducted at a time when the prime minister is copping increasing reprimands about incessant globetrotting on his private jet. Some of the tut-tutting is from political opponents, some of it is from the media. The Coalition can speak out both sides of its mouth on this issue. Dutton and others are both delighted the prime minister is representing Australia’s interests overseas, and terribly cranky he’s not at home, sometimes in the same sentence. The bloviations on talkback radio and political panel shows proceed along the lines of why isn’t Albanese here and razor-focused on cost of living; why is he hobnobbing with Joe Biden and the captains of woke capital?
Bloody elitist.
(Confected) rage against the (alleged) elites is now all the rage. Have you noticed? We reached a point of high farce this week when a claque of (provably) elite rightwing Australian parliamentarians and former parliamentarians cosplaying as everymen and women gathered in London to bemoan (among other things) the obnoxious persistence of elitism at a soiree convened by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, a ginger group backed by (wait for it) a pro-Brexit hedge fund billionaire and a Dubai-based investment group.
Choice insights from this surely you jest jamboree included John Howard still not loving multiculturalism and Tony Abbott still not loving climate science. Our platoon of intrepid culture warriors – avowed contrarians who gathered to agree vigorously with one another, exchange secret handshakes and identical platitudes – maintained close watch on the creeping oppression of wokeism and the “ahistorical and utterly implausible” heresy of climate science. You’d say grow up, but what would be the point? Performance and provocation is the point.
Albanese is attempting to ignore the static and get about his business. It’s certainly true that a prime minister more intent on winning the “optics” would stay closer to home rather than flying to Washington, Shanghai, Beijing, the Cook Islands and then back to San Fransisco in the space of a month. But Albanese continues to conduct what, at times, feels like a radical governing experiment in a fractured and febrile age. Australia’s current prime minister does things because he thinks they are important. He has an unfashionable fetish for substance.
The trip to the US last week was important. The coming trip to China is one of the most significant forays of Albanese’s prime ministership. For people concerned the prime minister isn’t doing enough to counter domestic cost-of-living pressure, let me share one, potentially, clarifying insight. Imagine what strategic competition, spiralling into global conflict, would do to global and domestic inflation?
Albanese in Australia, and Joe Biden in the US, are trying to establish relationships with their global peers that enable disputes to be settled by dialogue. This is a very simple strategic objective, modest enough, I guess, to provoke derision or disdain. But in a dangerous world, those relationships, these conversations, the ability to pick up the phone at a critical juncture, are all that stands between innocents and soul-shaking catastrophe. If you need a proof point, look at Israel and Palestine.
Looping back to where we started, Albanese will enjoy walking in the footsteps of Whitlam, one of his political heroes, for the next few days. This particular Labor leader, mentored from adolescence by Tom Uren, one of the key left faction figures of the Whitlam era, will sense the ghost of Gough when he walks into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Monday.
Given Dutton wants to cast Albanese as a latter-day Whitlam – as a progressive Labor leader vulnerable to a knockout blow because he’s too aspirational, too out of sync with the domestic zeitgeist – Australia’s opposition leader will like this symbolism too, for different reasons. It will play neatly into his domestic narrative. Perhaps Dutton’s narrative will prove compelling.
But Albanese won’t be thinking about Dutton’s Whitlam – a merchant of chaos sacked by the governor general in 1975 – when he meets Xi at the seat of Chinese power. Albanese will be hoping to channel the Whitlam of his own folklore, of his own personal hinterland: a Labor leader who ran towards the future, and set Australia up for decades to come.
