The former Australian prime minister Scott Morrison has defended his failure to introduce sanctions against Chinese officials over human rights abuses, saying he ran out of time before his election loss.
His comments to a conference in Tokyo on Friday prompted the Australian foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, to declare: “I’m not sure how much advice it would be sensible to take from Mr Morrison on foreign policy.”
Wong was responding to Morrison’s suggestion that Australia should “demand and expect” an end to China’s tariffs and bans against a range of Australian exports, rather than “be thankful for” initial progress to date.
“I have made clear we believe it is in the interests of both countries, including China, for those trade impediments to be removed,” Wong told reporters in Canberra.
Morrison visited Japan for a symposium organised by the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, a group of parliamentarians that urges democracies to take a strong coordinated stand against the Chinese Communist party.
He urged the Albanese government to consider “whether our new sanctions regime should be applied to any Chinese nationals for human rights abuses, especially in Xinjiang”.
Morrison argued there was “certainly credible and actionable evidence” to impose targeted sanctions despite Beijing’s denials.
The call sparked questions about why his government stopped short of taking such action between December 2021, when its Magnitsky-style sanctions laws passed parliament, and the May 2022 election.
Morrison told the symposium on Friday the timeframe was a “challenge”.
He suggested his government only had time to use the new powers for an initial set of sanctions against Russian officials. That related to the original case that sparked the international campaign for new targeted sanctions powers named after the late tax adviser Sergei Magnitsky.
“We moved through a fairly comprehensive process to consider the first round of them. That got us to mid-March,” Morrison said.
Morrison said there “just simply wasn’t the window between that first round” of sanctions and the election in May.
He said if countries such as Australia or Japan considered applying sanctions within their own region, there had to be time for “dialogue amongst partners”.
“You don’t just drop this on the table,” he said.
But Morrison said his government had done “a lot of work” about “what could be done”.
“That’s why it’s appropriately now the consideration of the new government and I wish them well with that,” Morrison said.
Morrison also said he was pleased that diplomatic dialogue had resumed between Australia and China since the election, but it “should never have been terminated by the Chinese government in the first place”. He took aim at China for responding to his government’s call for a Covid origins inquiry by “putting Australia in the diplomatic deep freeze” and “engaging in regular public tirades against Australia”.
Wong said the Australian government never speculated on the imposition of sanctions in advance of decisions being made.
But the foreign minister said sanctions were “one of the ways – not the only but one of the ways – in which Australia will express and assert its values”. She said human rights were central to Australia’s national interest.
Morrison remains in the parliament as a backbench MP under the Liberal party leadership of his former cabinet colleague Peter Dutton. Responding to Morrison’s intervention on Friday, Dutton said Australia should “express our values without fear” and “call out” human rights abuses, but “the next steps from there are for others to consider”.
