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Australia’s China debate gets more rancorous with harassment, threats and lawsuits
- Defamation claims against journalists, online hate campaigns against researchers: Australia’s debate on China has become vitriolic
- The hawks say Beijing is eroding academic freedom in Australia; the doves say the hawks are beating Beijing to it
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Threats of defamation suits against academics and journalists by an Australian federal government worker. Calls for the firing of a prominent China scholar. An online hate campaign against a think tank analyst who has researched alleged forced labour in Xinjiang.
Even for a topic known to generate heat, Australia’s debate on China is plumbing new depths of rancour. With Sino-Australian relations languishing at their lowest point in decades, those who weigh in on how to manage the country’s ties with its largest trading partner are facing blowback ranging from harassment and threats, to the spectre of legal action.
“You end up getting a very emotionally-driven discussion,” said Dominic Meagher, a visiting fellow at the Australian National University’s college of Asia and the Pacific. “It doesn’t seem to be a good environment for understanding truth, what really is happening.”
“If everything is so politicised, it becomes hard to know what’s real,” he said.
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In recent weeks, lawyers for Geoff Wade, a researcher in Canberra’s Parliament House Library, have threatened five parties including journalists and a former diplomat with a defamation lawsuit.
One of the parties is independent journalist Marcus Reubenstein, who wrote and published a story questioning Wade’s intentions for including a publicly-available photo of nine Australian-born schoolchildren aged between seven and eight – some with Chinese ancestry – in a Twitter thread that drew links between a Chinese language teachers’ association and the Chinese Communist Party. The children’s not-for-profit school, which has denied any links to the teachers’ association named by Wade, is partly funded by the Australian Capital Territory government.
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