Why is Australia warning about war with China? A clue: elections loom

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"By our resolve and our strength, by our preparedness of arms, and by our statecraft, let us get about reducing the likelihood of war - but not at the cost of our precious liberty," he said. 

The Morrison government's talk of war has continued to escalate since the outbreak of the virus last year, to the point that it has eclipsed even the rhetoric emanating from China's fiercest competitor, the US.

Political observers say there is a reason for this: Morrison's Liberal/National Coalition government sees such talk as its winning ticket in a federal election that must be called by May next year. 

"The Liberal [Coalition] Party in Australia has always marked itself as the strongest party on national security and economic management. So, at election time it will always want to highlight these," former diplomat and ambassador Colin Heseltine said. 

With China being portrayed as a bully in the region, particularly in local mainstream media, many Australians now saw China in very negative terms and agreed with the government's approach, he said. 

"Hence the government's policy of push-back against China, and calling it out publicly, even if this comes at an economic cost, and even though I and many others disagree with this approach."

The University of Sydney's professor of history who has held roles in the government's defence and intelligence departments James Curran, said playing the China card at the next election was seen as a positive for the Morrison government.

"They know it, and we know they know it, and we have been able to see this in the public messaging for some time now," he said. 

Curran did not think Morrison was doing the US' bidding, but believed recent rhetoric "reveals a fear which dare not speak its name in Australia, which is the fear that the US may not want to engage in an existential struggle with China for supremacy in Asia".

Curran said Morrison's advisers had already canvassed the benefits of playing the "red card" at the next election, after polls showed a collapse in public attitudes towards China. This would have reinforced the government's inclination towards war and national security rhetoric, he said. 

"And feelings towards China on a scale of zero to 100 have fallen sharply in 2020, to 39. This represents a fall of 10 degrees in a single year and is the lowest score that China has received in the history of the poll," the think tank said. 

The government had played up a perceived national security threat from China amid an "appalling" lack of understanding and knowledge about the country in Australia, Heseltine said. 

"None of these objectives would be advanced by military conflict - in fact it would be disastrous for China. This view is rarely aired in the media or by the government."

The Coalition has used similar strategies in the past. During its campaign in 2013, it used the infamous "turn back the boats" catchphrase in reference to asylum seekers who breached the law by "jumping the queue" on immigration. Before that, the former Coalition prime minister John Howard had relied on the "war on terror". 

But politicians from the opposition Labor party, too, have a history of being vocal on "turning back the boats", labelling Indochina refugees who arrived in Australia in the 1970s as queue jumpers looking for a better economic life rather than being genuine refugees.

Security is consistently a key issue in Australian politics. 

Curran said the fear of China and a hangover from the Cold War - a period of ideological and geopolitical tensions between the US and the communist bloc - were other reasons behind the growing "anti-China" sentiment among Australian voters. 

"The ease with which all these kinds of metaphor - Cold War mindset, invasion scares, yellow peril, red lava, red flags and red zones - the way in which this kind of language has been wheeled into the debate and deployed with such force so as to dominate and completely wipe out alternative views on how we might deal with China's rise is a problem," he told an Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio programme recently. 

"We cannot get past, it seems, some of these older memories. There are legitimate reasons to be worried about China and what it's doing, but is reviving older ghouls and ghosts and seeing haunted images around every corner the way to do it?"

He said it still begged the question as to why Australia was using this kind of language when not even Washington or regional allies were.

In the same programme, former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans said many Australian politicians seemed stuck on the "hot war/cold war" history. A smarter tactic would be to use international diplomacy to both stand up to and work with China. 

"You've got people who have pretty crude political motives who do think there's some virtue in running another khaki election in due course. And stirring up the population to think in those terms, I think that's misplaced," he said. 

Another former Australian diplomat, Alison Broinowski, summarised the Coalition's election plan in the public policy journal Pearls & Irritations as follows: "To ingratiate Australia to the US, set up China as a threat to Australia, frighten the voters, and assure them that Australia will not be intimidated and will defend our 'values' and the 'rules-based international order'." 

The constant mentions of war have not escaped the notice of Beijing. A recent editorial in the state-run People's Daily said Australia had a "pathological obsession" with war against China.

When asked whether the use of the word "war" was necessary or legitimate, Michael Shoebridge of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (a defence department-funded think tank), who was on the same programme as Curran and Evans, said words were not as important as the problem itself. 

"I think that having a public discussion about serious issues that affect Australia's security, and the region's security, is important. And I think getting too tangled up in whether or not we're having the right kind of choice of language, and missing the reason we need to have the discussion is a risk."

He said a democracy must be prepared to discuss sensitive national security issues including "major conflict", which he said was a euphemism for war, and that prospects of "major conflicts" involving Australia were now sufficiently credible. 

"From the perspective of a growing number of Australians - and this is an emerging bipartisan consensus in Canberra - if China continues to grow, the security competition in East Asia will become more intense," he said. 

"This heavy-handed behaviour is seen by many as a threat to the sovereignty of countries in the region, including Australia."

Australians saw China's rise as different from that of the US because China did not share the same values as Australia, Switzer said. 

The US and Australia had supported each other in every major foreign policy crisis since the first world war, he noted. 

"The Chinese Communist Party does not share our values of democracy and individual freedom," he added.

The founding director of Australian think tank China Matters Linda Jakobson said not only did China not want war, neither did any other country in the region - despite Beijing's decades-long stance that it is prepared to use force to reunite Taiwan with the mainland if necessary. 

"It's a hugely complex issue that is difficult to resolve. But this talk of war does not achieve anything constructive," she said. "This is gratuitous fear mongering by the Australian government."

This meant Canberra had misread China's growth and expansion, said Wang Peng, research director at Renmin University's Centre for International Energy and Environment Strategy Studies. 

Former Australian ambassador to China Geoff Raby also thought China's intentions had been misunderstood. Beijing was not looking to expand with force nor to engage in war, he said. 

"[China] has not set out to remake the world in its image ... but to create an international environment that provides stability, minimises threats and challenges, and does not seek to undermine the Chinese Communist Party's claim to be the sole government and source of power in China," he said in his new book China's Grand Strategy and Australia's Future in the New Global Order. 

"The contest is often misunderstood as zero-sum: either one group prevails or not."

Additional reporting by Maria Siow

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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