“The Australian colonies not only targeted the miners from all other nationalities engaged in the great gold rush of the 1850s and ’60s, they then federated and legislated a White Australia policy against the Chinese for the next 90 years,” writes “The Gadfly” columnist ROBERT MACKLIN. 

IT is unfortunate – but not surprising – that Prime Minister Scott Morrison chose to conflate his continuing attack on China with the signing of the trade agreement between Australia and Britain – that country’s first such deal since leaving the EU.

The agreement is hardly earth-shaking – a few more British backpackers can come to Australia and in a few years there will be some noticeable tariff reductions to a few Australian exports. But the real impact of the deal is its symbolism. As former Foreign Minister Bill Hayden said: “In diplomacy, words are bullets.”

Alas, Scotty from Marketing’s words are the salesman’s pitch for votes in the next election. His language, when not the meaningless babble of tongues to some Pentecostal god, is the almost equally inchoate English of the excited marketeer. His sense of history is confined to the day before yesterday.

No so the Chinese. They take their history seriously. That apocryphal Chinese professor wasn’t joking when asked recently about the effect of Christianity’s arrival in Europe. His answer: “It’s too soon to tell”. 

Every succeeding Chinese Dynasty – which invariably gains power through violent uprising – rewrites the history of its predecessor to justify its heaven-sent elevation to the Dragon Throne. 

But some things they do get right. The present Communist Dynasty still burns over “the century of humiliation” visited upon them in the 1800s by the European colonial powers led by Britain. 

And, as I discovered in researching and writing my 2017 book, “Dragon and Kangaroo – the shared history of Australia and China” – our connection is a continuum from the crime against humanity that was the British opium wars. 

Those attacks began in 1842, forcing the Chinese to open their ports to the influx of opium from Britain’s other big colony, India, while at the same time it occupied the Australian continent by force of arms. 

To underline the connection, the Australian colonies not only targeted the miners from all other nationalities engaged in the great gold rush of the 1850s and ’60s. They then federated and legislated a White Australia policy against the Chinese for the next 90 years.

Little wonder, perhaps, that they’re sensitive about the Anglo-Australianism that Morrison exemplifies.

None of the above is designed to excuse the latest stupidities of the Chinese leadership in seeking to “punish” Australia for Morrison’s bullish blundering among the diplomatic niceties. 

Nor does it acquit the foolish ambitions of limited men in positions of great power and influence.

Xi Jinping is just such a man. As I wrote in “Dragon”: “[He rules] a massive population who have been denied the basic human rights of freedom of assembly and expression within a legal system subject to blatant political interference. 

“There is no more reason to believe that Xi is immune from Lord Acton’s iron law – that all power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely – than were his predecessors in the Communist Dynasty or their imperial antecedents on the Dragon Throne.” 

But it’s a sad quirk of history that at such a time Australia finds itself led by a man whom the Americans so mistrusted that they persuaded Boris Johnson to “crash” the scheduled meeting with President Biden. 

They knew that Bill Hayden’s warning also applied to images.

robert@robertmacklin.com