As I was reading Gareth Evans’s recent piece on what a ‘mature’ relationship with China should comprise, I was reminded of the photograph set out below, which was taken in December 1989. It depicts the then foreign ministers, Gareth Evans of Australia and Ali Alatas of Indonesia, on an aeroplane toasting their signing of the Timor Gap Treaty, which divided the vast oil and gas resources discovered in the Timor Sea between the two countries they represented.

The date of the photograph is important because it was smack bang in the middle of Indonesia’s bloody occupation of East Timor, which began in 1975 and ended in 1999, and which the Australian and US governments supported. Without any objection from Australia (or the US), the Indonesian occupiers killed about one quarter of the East Timorese population, or the equivalent of about 7 million Australians, and committed other atrocities.

Pictures, as they say, are worth a thousand words. This one, because it expresses so vividly the essence of one of the ‘moral’ (capitalist) guiding principles of Australian governments. It goes something like this: ‘never let the slaughter of tens of thousands of brown people “over there” ever interfere with maximising profit or pleasing our corporate benefactors and the Godfather in Washington DC’.

As we have suggested briefly elsewhere, Australia’s short history since its invasion by white settlers, and particularly since the rise of the US after WWII, is drenched with bloody examples that demonstrate the adherence to this principle by successive Australian governments. The latest and most egregious illustration is Australia’s provision of different types of support to Israel for all of its dirty work in Palestine and in other parts of the Middle East.

You can therefore imagine the wry smiles in Beijing when they read the advice given to the current Australian government by the very same Mr Evans on the ‘do’s’ and ‘don’ts’ of relations with China, particularly the following:

But Australia should never back away from respectfully making clear its own concerns on political and economic issues.

Geopolitically, Australia’s concerns include China’s territorial ambition in and militarisation of the South China Sea, its repeatedly stated determination to unify Taiwan with the mainland not just by persuasion but by force if necessary, and its dramatically increasing military capability, including nuclear arsenal. Politically, they extend to China’s intolerance of any form of real or perceived dissent, including in Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong, with some of its activity extending to the attempted suppression of dissenting voices in the diaspora community in Australia.

Are we really expected to believe that the likes of Mr Evans and his successors care more about the people of Tibet, Hong Kong, Xinjiang (the Uyghurs) and Taiwan than they have ever shown that they did about other brown people in places like Afghanistan, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Libya, Lebanon, Palestine, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Timor-Leste, and Vietnam?

Or is Mr Evans soon going to write another piece urging Ms Wong and Mr Albanese to raise (‘respectfully’ of course) in their next ‘mature’ conversation with the ‘daddy’ in Washington DC Australia’s ‘concerns’ regarding the US desire to rule the world by force and its slaughter of people in wars that it has instigated, perpetrated or supported just (so as not to overdo it) since the turn of the century (by some estimates between 4.5 and 4.7 million), starting with Palestine?

Or, more likely, is it that, despite the trade benefits (and money and profit) involved in Australia’s interactions with China, government is unwilling to turn its well-practised money-grubbing blind eye to China’s internal transgressions because Mr Trump might take it as a sign that Australia is ‘cosying up’ to China and impose a tariff or two as he did recently to India because of its trade with Russia?

An Alternative Approach

Dear President Xi,

We have had a clean-out down here in Australia and now have a government that actually represents the views of its electorate.

One of the first things we did was to eliminate all the US military bases we had. We are no longer, as one wag put it, a US military base with marsupials.

I have to say that I am not sure that we and the US would have continued to trade with a country that housed, on behalf of a sworn enemy, numerous military bases targeted at us. More likely, we would have simply bombed the shit out of them (excuse the language). We are therefore very grateful for the restraint that you have shown us in that regard. I honestly cannot imagine what my predecessors were thinking.

We have also been working hard to right some of the wrongs we have committed against our own indigenous people and against others in the region and further afield. We won’t be able to cover them all – there are simply too many – but we strongly believe that the first step is to admit our culpability and then to follow that up with substantive and substantial reparations.

And we are trying to get over the idea that Anglo-Celts are superior to everyone else and can do pretty much anything they like, particularly if they are a member of the US-led ‘Anglo club’ – from which we are now barred. That should do wonders for a genuinely rule-based global order, don’t you think?

There is much more to explain in a similar vein, but I just wanted to get the ball rolling on a relationship with your great and ancient civilisation that is based on honesty, consistency, humility, and mutual respect.

Yours sincerely

Conclusion

Clearly, cooperation with China should be at the top of Australia’s foreign policy agenda.

But, please, it can do without the white superiority, the obsequiousness to the US, the counterfeit compassion, and the holier-than-thou nonsense! They’re either wrong or hypocritical, and they’re all embarrassing.

The post The Admonishment of China by Governments in Glass Houses first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.