Stern Hu

The Prime Minister has his mojo back on the domestic front thanks to some Kevin07-style plain-speaking and a victorious health debate. Now it is time for him to strut his stuff on the world stage and become an “arse-kicking Prime Minister”, starting with China.

A lot has been written about acting and politics in the last few weeks since Opposition Leader Tony Abbott turned down acting lessons. In my favourite movie Love Actually there is a famous scene involving the heartthrob British Prime Minister played by Hugh Grant. Annoyed by a misogynist American President he stands up to him for taking advantage of their bilateral friendship.

“I love that word relationship,” the Prime Minister begins, with his beautiful admirer of a secretary Natalie walking in on the press conference.

Continue reading "Rudd needs a Hugh Grant moment to stand up to China" »

The decision by a Shanghai court to sentence Stern Hu to ten years should teach us a lesson about the future of our relationship with China: Australia cannot expect to continue to reap the benefits of Chinese cash without periodically accepting some of its pernicious qualities.

Following the Hu sentence there will no doubt be a temptation to invoke what could be called the “Corby Protocol”, which assumes that whenever an Australian is arrested in a non-Western country they are ipso facto innocent and victims of a corrupt and dictatorial regime.

But in this case it would probably be in our interest to understand that while Hu has become a victim of the workings of the Chinese state and business, he was also very much a product of it. This was a position that up until this point had made him, and by extension Australia, very wealthy.

Continue reading "With China it’s not all beer and dim sum" »

The world is entering a new dynamic which is merely a repetition of the recasting of the political, social and economic order that has happened for as long as man can write about it.

History is punctuated with the ebbs and flows of kingdoms, empires and political movements and the conflicts that are always apparent at the peripheries of influence that abuts competing interests. In the past, the cycle of influence was over, sometimes thousands and generally hundreds of years.

From the initial cultivation of land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and the Sumerian civilisation, to the Greeks, to the Romans, to the Qin Dynasty, the first imperial dynasty of the Chinese, to the British Empire, we notice that the rise and fall of empires accelerates as technology, personified by communications, military hardware, economic processes and other associated influences advances.

Continue reading "The real price of economic prosperity might be freedom" »

If you ever find yourself in a foreign prison awaiting representation from Australia on your behalf just pray that West Australian Premier Colin Barnett does not come through the door.

Not only is he unlikely to put up any kind of a fight for you, after a big Yum Cha lunch he may well agree to pull the hanging lever should your executioner be off sick.

Like the prince of a Chinese tributary kingdom of the middle-ages Colin Barnett travelled to Shanghai to assure his leaders that he wasn’t angry at them over the arrest of Stern Hu – actually it was our fault as Australians for over-reacting.

Continue reading "The best eunuch in the Chinese court: Colin Barnett" »

While the Australian media is working itself into a frenzy over the jailing of Rio Tinto executive Stern Hu, the public seems to be forming a more pragmatic view of our relationship with China.

The Federal Opposition’s attempts to whip up a new round of dog whistling over the arrest have fallen on deaf ears as the public accepts there are things that are outside the power of even a Mandarin-speaking Prime Minister.

But the failure of the Hu jailing to bite with the public may speak to a broader maturing in out attitude towards the emerging superpower to which our fortunes are so closely tied.

Continue reading "What we really think about Stern Hu" »

I keep waiting for the traditional church to launch its campaign against the government’s treatment of boat people.

After all, boats carrying asylum seekers keep entering Australian waters in greater numbers, there are allegations that boats are left to drift and, worst of all, some have perished along the way.

I glance skyward in Melbourne, looking for the immense banner hanging from the spire St Paul’s Cathedral, like there was a few years ago. Instead of “Justice for David Hicks”, it will read “Justice for SIEV 624”.

Continue reading "Churches pray for terrorist and ignore a businessman" »

One of the more bracing moments of my adolescence involved going to the movies with a female friend, also in her late teens, to see the French film Betty Blue which opens with an explosive 10-minute sex scene which is arousing enough to fire up an entire retirement village, let alone an 18-year-old lad who is already as toey as a roman sandal.

When Beatrice Dalle finally got around to having her orgasm and the actual dialogue began - aside from the “oui! oui! oui! oui! oui!” spectacle we’d just witnessed - my friend, a hysterical young Francophile who’d just spent an off-year living in Paris, whispered to me: “This just isn’t going to survive the translation.”

Her pretence was eclipsed only by mine as, in the same way that she had a terminal dose of the French, I’d just come back from an off-year living in Mexico, and was so badly afflicted by a showy determination to steer any conversation in the direction of Latin America that it’s remarkable the two of us ever managed to have an intelligible conversation at all…

Continue reading "PM latest victim of bourgeois bilingual showpony disorder" »

He may be known as the Ruddbot, but when it comes to his much vaunted specialist skills on China, it would seem that batteries were not included.

As the Prime Minister plays catch up on being caught flat footed on the Stern Hu case, he needs to demonstrate that his special China skills are not just a party trick, but can genuinely be used in Australia’s interests.

When in Opposition, Kevin Rudd was quick to criticise John Howard, claiming he was “dragging his feet on providing Mr Hicks with a fair trial”. These were his exact words in a door stop he gave almost four years ago on August 2.

Continue reading "Free David Hicks, but fumble on Stern Hu" »

Nothing that follows is personally approved by David Penberthy or Rupert Murdoch, let alone Kevin Rudd. That’s the beauty of writing for a free media in a democracy.

However, it’s equally ludicrous to suggest that every word that appears in China’s state-owned media every day represents the personal views of Chinese president Hu Jintao.

I don’t know Hu - who really does? - but I’m not sure he would have chosen the noun “perfidy” to describe Rio Tinto’s betrayal of Chinalco a couple of months back. Yet that phrase was quickly interpreted as the semi-official, if colourful, position of China Inc to the collapse of the deal - purely because it ran on the “state-owned” Xinhua news agency.

Continue reading "How a man’s jailing exposed China’s state-run spin" »

餵。我的名字是凱文，我有一個非常大的問題 (Translation: Hello, my name is Kevin and I have a very big problem).

Oh how Kevin Rudd must be wishing right now for a dirty stoush with, oh, let’s say Malaysia, or Indonesia, or even better, one of the African nations.

How terribly unlucky for the Prime Minister that his first bona fide diplomatic crisis involves China. Our man in Beijing is facing calls to personally intervene in the case of Australian Rio Tinto executive Stern Hu, who’s being held without charge by Chinese authorities on suspicion of commercial espionage.

Continue reading "Hu’s Rudd’s biggest headache" »