Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Managing our relationships with other countries has always been the federal government's job, and of course the federal government should always be determining what is in our national interest. But in some kind of Trumpian act the Prime Minister now wants the entire nation to be overcome with amnesia about his own record. He wants us to forget that it was his government that ticked off the sale of the Port of Darwin, a strategic asset, to a Chinese company. He wants us to forget that when Victoria signed a memorandum of understanding with China in 2018 his trade minister, Senator Birmingham, declared, 'That's something we welcome.' Most of all, he wants us to forget that in September 2017 his government signed its own BRI memorandum of understanding with China. What is in this BRI deal? We don't know. The Prime Minister refuses to tell us. Why? Because, as Fairfax newspapers reported in 2018, China has not agreed to do so.

Unlike the Morrison government, federal Labor has made it clear that we would not sign up to the BRI. It's time the Morrison government started properly managing our international relations instead of chasing headlines.