A Working Strategy for Sino-Australian Relations

In his 2011 book, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, Rumelt explains that a hallmark of “bad strategy” is “statements of desire rather than plans for overcoming obstacles”. (Laurenceson, J https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/australia-china-politics-heats-up )

It's hard to fault the above analysis. After all, when it comes to solving problems in engaging with a Great Power like China in a way that is mutually beneficial and profits all Australians, we need healthy diplomacy and a plan for concrete action, as well as the imagination and courage to do things differently.

There is, as James Laurenceson has astutely pointed out - no shortage of bad China strategy on offer in Australia. However, this is hardly surprising given the gross foreign interference that we are subject to by The Crown and by the US military industrial missile-shop complex.

Currently our China policies are guided less by economic and political strategy than they are by US-backed missile marketing shops like ASPI and, even worse, delusional megacults like #Hillsong and Falun Gong.

Pentecostalism is an American invention. Falun Gong is a kooky Chinese cult. Who said we don't like foreign interference with our politics and culture in Australia? Apparently it just has to be bizarre enough?

Those are not the only weird hallmarks of Australia's serious China un-strategy policy problems (Tip of the hat to Lewis Carroll. Unstrategy is something like an unbirthday. The two share the feature of being similarly celebrated daily on an irrational, or at least ad-hoc, basis).

One does not have to scan the horizon very far to find much worse 'hallmarks' of our China un-strategy.

The Chinese Consulate in Australia is currently teamed with Larouchian conspiracy theorist nutters, and Australia is currently partnered through @ScottMorrisonMP with #QAnon loons and paying them $85K of taxpayer money to wife-sit. These are also "hallmarks" indicative of really bad strategy.

Okay - so the first one is China's bad. Mostly. But - couldn't someone have warned them? That would have been the polite thing to do for guests. (Answer: It's unlikely that no one from ASIO to Canberra knew. I certainly warned the Chinese Consulate in a Twitter DM after they started sharing Citizen's Party propaganda.)

It's not nice to treat the tourists and guests like fools. Especially when they send lots of their nice young people here to learn and pay us lots of money for it. It's downright rude, to be honest.

Why is Morrison's involvement with Hillsong and QAnon bad for our China strategy? If you need me to answer that for you then I am gravely concerned indeed, dear reader. It's probably better if we do not give the appearances of being in thrall to the insane. That's probably much better for healthy foreign relations with China.

Australia, since you're struggling with a lot of bad China strategy, I will give you some simple and bold steps right now to solve many of the the problems that both sides of our duoploy have caused over the last decade:

1. Partner with #China in their space program.

2. Let China build space-explorative launch facilities in NT, and get them to build vocational language and technology colleges and universities attached to the bases.

3. Stop allowing the US military industrial complex to do illicit and illegal foreign interference in Australian politics and policy via brink tanks like ASPI.

4. Prosecute parliamentarians who use warmonger rhetoric and thus carelessly, and completely needlessly, endanger the lives and wellbeing of their fellow Australians.

5. Join Xi’s BRI and enter into open trade deals with #China so that we can have greater bargaining power with the US.

6. Remove The Crown from our Courts and our Upper and Lower House, and establish a full Republic in order to stop the UK from interfering in Sino-Australian relations, and adversely affecting our ability to deal openly and profitably with #China.

7. When these steps have been followed and the risk of war with China in the SCS has thus been mitigated to nothing, investigate the possibility of using Chinese Hualong One nuclear power stations as an alternative clean power source in order to help drop our carbon to near zero.

8. Encourage an increase in partnerships with Chinese and other foreign technology research programs, and revive our tertiary education sector to pre-Morrison status.

Those 'tactics', commensurate actions, and diplomatic manoeuvres fit into an overall pragmatic, globalist strategy will solve a lot of current problems. To help prevent relapses into the current state of disarray, we should also introduce parliamentary legislation to prevent megacults like #Hillsong (or any other anti-scientific megacult) from directly influencing our foreign and domestic policy with dominionist, delusional, atavistic, arcane doctrinal imperatives and agendas involving kooky supernaturalist beliefs and imaginary omniscient over-beings.

This will give sensible and strategically savvy Great Power China far more confidence in our ability to work with them profitably and meaningfully.

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