The Murdoch Press sure knows how to whip up an eye-catching headline – it may be its longest suit. True to form, on 19 January 25 The Weekend Australian ran a corker – “HOW THE AMERICAN HATERS IN OUR MIDST GO EASY ON CHINA.”
Beneath this disturbing banner there was a long and winding article by Rowan Callick, a Brit, journo, book writer and speechmaker who came to Australia in 1987. He’s been a Murdoch employee and has written reams for The Australian, including on China where he has lived. He’s been a correspondent for Time magazine and The Australian Financial Review and a member of auspicious government boards. He is an examining chaplain for the Anglican Archdiocese of Melbourne and an “Industry Fellow” at Griffith University. He has an Order of the British Empire. A member of the Imperial Honours System – how more elite can one get?
For better or worse, Callick’s 19 January opus doesn’t live up to its headline. Those expecting him to expose Chinese Communist liking-USA Capitalist hating deviants undermining local “values” and democratic ways will be disappointed. Thus, he says:
- “Australian opinion leaders….are set to intensify their own antipathy to the US.”
- “many also applaud what is still being called ‘China’s rise’”.
- “..for others, including among elites…the US has defaulted post-Vietnam into the prime target of their hostility..”.
- “..the PRC has emerged as a society that has attracted and sustained respect bordering on admiration…among some Australian elites…”
- “…some elite elements in Australia fear abandonment not so much by the US as by China.”
“Opinion leaders”, “many”, “others”, “some Australian elites”, “elite elements” – who are these people? Callick doesn’t say.
He complains that “Australian elites…have developed an almost pathological obsession with Trump” that has “led to a strange whataboutism – a political tool whereby a critique of Xi or the PRC, say, is required to be balanced by a parallel critique of Trump or the US, as if they were two sides of an identical coin.” Callick continues “When someone’s lack of knowledge of or even interest in a subject such as contemporary China is on the verge of being exposed, that person thus may say defensively, flipping the topic: ‘Well, look what America did in Iraq…”.
How tantalising. Yet sorry, no member of the “Australian elites” guilty of this heinous habit is identified. And just how heinous is it to remark on double standards and hypocrisy as these inclinations are not always helpful, even in foreign policy.
When he does get to name names, Callick lands on former Foreign Affairs and Trade Department Secretary, Peter Varghese and former Foreign Ministers Gareth Evans and Bob Carr. It’s not clear if the agitated scribe regards these worthies as “US haters” but if he does, that would probably come as a surprise to them, and to others, even those not in elite circles.
Still, Varghese is dropped in it for having the front to suggest that “a stable China constraining balance does not turn on the retention of US primacy”, while Evans and Carr are clipped for “supporting a balance of power in the Indo-Pacific region…”. If it’s any consolation, Callick also hops into “six Australian academics” [unnamed possibly for privacy reasons] who, in 2022, proposed “ideas and concepts to re-invigorate a progressive approach to Australian foreign policy” with “scarcely” a mention of “human rights.”
Callick consoles himself by saying that “Washington has reshaped its alliance networks” from a “hub-and-spokes arrangement….to a lattice work” with Australia, Japan, the Philippines and South Korea. Yet in a tough to unscramble sentence, he worries that “it remains to be determined who else, alongside or instead of the US, will step up to champion democracy and freedom more effectively and how, but also how important these values still are to a significant section of Australians and whether they may have been successfully tainted as American or hawkish.”
To rub it in, Callick wonders, without apparent irony, if in Australia “democracy, freedoms and human rights” are “to be rebranded as exclusively American or hawkish and thus downgraded to low priority.”
The opinion leader ends his article with a tendentious flourish, saying that there is “a great deal at stake for Australia, as Trump triggers an avalanche of elite antagonism, while Xi presses on towards his epochal goals as the Snake Year….slithers into sight on January 29.”
Callick’s article sacrifices coherence for vague, rhetorical accusations, mostly against unidentified denizens in the elite, a class he presumably knows well. He’s hot on democracy, freedom and human rights but he is reticent about what he’d do to advance these causes. Maybe they’re well covered in his other extensive writings although on the basis of his 19 January note in The Australian, the curious might consider if they have better things to do than consult them. Say like changing the sheets on their beds or feeding the cat.
Paddy Gourley is a superannuated Commonwealth public servant.