China ‘deplores’ Liberal MP Andrew Hastie for Nazi Germany comparison
“Labor frontbencher Jim Chalmers said Mr Hastie’s intervention was extreme, overblown and unwelcome. He said both major parties had to navigate complex economic and national security issues when managing the relationship with China. ‘This kind of intervention makes that harder, not easier’, he told ABC Radio National. [Hastie] said Australia had ignored the role of ideology in communist China’s push for influence in 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’, Hastie said.
Mr Hastie noted western commentators once believed Josef Stalin’s Soviet Russia was the ‘rational actions of a realist great power’.
‘We must be intellectually honest and take the Chinese leadership at its word’, he wrote of President Xi Jinping’s speeches referencing Marxist-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.
Source: SBS.com.au
Comment: Most illuminating is that instead of debating with Mr Hastie, Chalmers has decided to attack him. Publically. Thus his response is appeasement.
The correct response to China’s concerns are, ‘We are an open society, we are having a debate. Thanks for your opinion, BTW’.
Chalmers didn’t refute Hastie’s points. Does he agree with Hastie? If he disagreed it would be easier to refute Hastie’s argument. Publicly.
But Chalmers doesn’t. Doesn’t that confirm that Chalmers agrees with Hastie but regards it politically incorrect to say it openly?
Other points:
- They objected to the Nazi Germany analogy but not the Stalin analogy.
- Chalmers is Shadow Finance minister. What is he doing commenting on Defence and Foreign affairs?
- Is this issue too complex for Marles(Defence), Wong(Foreign Affairs) or Keneally(Intelligence)?
- Why didn’t Albanese, slap him down for making it harder to “navigate complex economic and national security issues”?
