China really is impacting Australian elections (and has been for some time)

Australia’s Minister for Defence, Peter Dutton, recently cited confidential security documents to support his claim that the Chinese Communist Party was backing Labor leader Anthony Albanese as their preferred candidate and had tried to interfere in the forthcoming Australian election. Dutton was apparently referring to claims that China had tried to influence Labor’s candidate selection. The Prime Minister Scott Morrison claimed that Labor wanted to ‘appease’ China and while his government ‘stood up’ to China he claimed ‘Labor, when it comes to these issues and keeping Australians safe, they’re just soft.’ He even called Labor’s deputy Leader Richard Marles ‘a Manchurian candidate’.

However, national security issues are only the most obvious way in which Australia's relationship with China is influencing Australia's election campaigns. There are also major economic issues arising from the increasingly strained relationship. The government has accused Labor of being prepared to sacrifice some industries in trade disputes with China, once again an accusation that Albanese strongly denies.
There are also more indirect economic links. For example, Clive Palmer recently announced that he has a budget of $100 million for advertising in this year's election. This time around, Palmer is running on a 'freedom' anti-government pandemic lockdown and restriction agenda and will be targeting both major parties in an attempt to seize the balance of power. We have yet to see how much anti-China rhetoric will feature in his campaign. However, perversely, Palmer has boasted that $100 million is 'only a couple of months work for me', given that he receives over $600 million annually in mining royalties from the Chinese company Citic (albeit after a long running legal dispute). It looks as though China will indeed be funding an intervention in the Australian election campaign, although certainly not in a way the Chinese government intended.
Australia's economic links with China have also impacted on federal elections in other ways. One of the reasons Labor went to the 2019 election proposing higher taxes was because of the major tax cuts and concessions of the Coalition government led by Prime Minister John Howard that were funded by the then Mining Boom (and minerals trade with China in particular). For example, then Labor Leader Bill Shorten explicitly argued that Howard had removed taxpayers paying franking dividend taxes on their shares because of the amount of money 'coming in from mining'. In Labor's view many of those tax cuts and concessions had reduced government revenue to unsustainable levels. Labor's backing away from its previous taxation agenda means that it will still have to deal with such funding shortfalls if elected. Similarly, Labor's current commitments to increase Australian-made goods and address stagnating Australian wages also need to be seen in the broader context of the negative impacts of increased economic competition from the rising powers of Asia, especially China.
Whoever wins government will have to deal with such geoeconomic and geopolitical challenges. So even if security issues do not come to a head, Australia's relationship with China will still be an issue. There will be no easy solutions for Labor to these intractable problems as there were in Whitlam's day. Then the Coalition government had denounced Opposition Leader Whitlam's visit to China, only to be blindsided by news that the U.S. was arranging for President Nixon to do the same. In short, Coalition's attempts to use fear of China had backfired spectacularly.
Of course, the Coalition may not have it all its own way. Some Coalition strategists are very concerned that the tough anti-China rhetoric could have a detrimental impact on crucial electorates with a high percentage of Australian-Chinese voters, particularly those with a mainland Chinese background. Australians of broader Asian heritage are also concerned by a related rise in anti-Asian racism. Furthermore, polling by Essential suggests that many voters want Australia's complex relationship with China to be managed in a far more nuanced and careful way than the Coalition's gung-ho rhetoric suggests.
Nonetheless, a changing geopolitics and geoeconomics means that China will continue to influence the nature of Australia's elections, even if not through direct, or claimed, attempts to do so by the Chinese government. A greater danger may be that the party-political weaponisation of Australia's relationship with China, while not new, risks leading to very poor policy and strategic outcomes. Washington, D.C., Sept. 15, 2021. Credit: US Secretary of Defense/Flickr. (This image has been cropped.)