Canberra - The chair of the Australian parliament's powerful
security and intelligence committee has warned against China's rise,
likening Australia's current experience with China to that of France
in the face of an aggressive Nazi Germany in the 1940s.
In an opinion piece published on Thursday, Andrew Hastie, a
conservative government lawmaker, wrote that Australia faces its
biggest economic and national security challenges in the next decade
from the rise of China.
"If we don't understand the challenge ahead... choices will be made
for us. Our sovereignty, our freedoms, will be diminished," he wrote.
The West once believed economic liberalisation would naturally lead
to China becoming a democracy, just as the French believed steel and
concrete forts would guard against a German advance in 1940, he
said.
"But their thinking failed catastrophically," Hastie, a former SAS
captain, said in an op-ed piece in newspapers the Sydney Morning
Herald and The Age.
Hastie said the French "had failed to appreciate the evolution of
mobile warfare," similar to Australia failing "to see how mobile our
authoritarian neighbour has become."
Australia faces a massive dilemma trying to balance its relationship
with China, its biggest trading partner, and the United States, its
closest strategic ally.
Australian media reaction to Hastie's comments was swift and largely
negative.
Opposition Labor parliamentarian Jim Chalmers called Hastie's remarks
extreme, overblown and unwelcome, saying Australia needed to navigate
complex issues when managing the relationship with China.
"This kind of intervention makes that harder, not easier [to navigate
the relationship with China]," Chalmers told Australian radio ABC.