Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In Hong Kong, as we stand here, tens of thousands of students and young professionals—thousands from all walks of life—are in the streets of that great city. As many as 80,000 people flooded the streets around the government complex at the peak of the protest at dawn of Monday. Led by the best and the brightest, these Hong Kongers, from a variety of political backgrounds and job experiences, are calling for the implementation of promised political reforms in what may be the biggest and most significant pro-democracy protests in China since 1989. Over the weekend, authorities brought in riot police and used tear gas, but so far the protestors, armed with umbrellas and glad-wrap to protect them from the gas shells, remain unbowed.

The roots of these protests go back to July 1997, when the United Kingdom handed Hong Kong back to China. Under the Basic Law, which Hong Kong adopted upon its return to China, Deng Xiaoping promised universal suffrage elections as the ultimate objective. Unfortunately, in the ensuing 17 years, the Communist Party has stymied democratic progress. Democracy is contradictory to the one-party state. Until now, the territory's chief executive has essentially been selected under a pro-Beijing mechanism. Beijing's long promised reforms to Hong Kong's voting system were officially announced in August this year. To the disappointment of a great many Hong Kongers, Chinese leader Xi Jinping refused genuinely free elections for the chief executive.

In 2017, according to Beijing, there will be a direct election of the Chief Executive of Hong Kong, but only individuals pre-approved by Beijing will be allowed to be candidates. One is reminded of the great American call for freedom, 'No taxation without representation.' In the words of Fairfax East Asia's editor, John Garnaut:

More broadly, they are protesting to preserve not just the hope of democracy … but the institutions of civil society that thrived under British law.

According to Garnaut:

These institutions of civil society have been under sustained assault since the ascendancy of China's impatient and uncompromising leader, Xi Jinping … It is the threat of losing them that has drawn so many in Hong Kong to the streets this week.

Beijing's refusal to allow genuine democratic reforms in Hong Kong will be put in stark relief later this month when East Asia's other behemoth, Indonesia, swears in its new democratically elected president, Joko Widodo. Self-made Mr Widodo, who was born in a slum and started his working life as a furniture maker, was directly elected by tens of millions of Indonesians. Indonesia, which all of us Australians now celebrate, is a raucous democracy.

Coincidentally, Australia's great neighbour to the north began its journey away from autocracy and towards democracy in July 1997 with the onset of the Asian Financial Crisis, an event which eventually led to the resignation of President Suharto after 31 years in power. In the intervening 17 years, in contrast to the situation in Hong Kong and China as a whole, Indonesia has succeeded in becoming South-East Asia's most democratic nation, a state of affairs that would have seemed unbelievable in the 1990s. As our closest and most important neighbour, Australians of course celebrate that great transition to democracy that has taken place in a country which, I might also remark, is the largest Muslim country in the world and proof that religion, ethnicity and being in Asia are no bar to people having aspirations common with those aspirations that most Australians have for freedom and life under the rule of law.

Despite the disturbing trends in evidence under Mr Xi, I remain optimistic that perhaps sooner or later the successors to the current leadership will realise that the best way to secure a strong, respected and prosperous China—a truly great power in every sense—is to dismantle the apparatus of state control and allow the Chinese people to choose their own government. Beijing only needs to look to Jakarta to see that democratic reform, while hard, can be achieved; and, not only that, it can be achieved while maintaining a high rate of economic growth.

Bao Pu, a democracy activist, recently said:

Nobody expects Beijing will change its mind, but nor can they arrest everybody. They're not playing for today but for their children … It's a fight for the future not the present. There's no mistake there: either you die kneeling down or standing up, and they're choosing to stand.

That is what the struggle in Hong Kong represents: the world of future democratic rule in China—the dark repression of Beijing or the democratic future of Hong Kong.