Cory Bernardi (SA, Australian Conservatives) Share this | Hansard source

I find myself in a rather uncomfortable position, because I do support this motion by Senator Patrick, who is a very measured contributor to this place and recognises there are difficulties facing this country that need to be confronted through the appropriate Senate committees, but I find myself having to vote on the same side of the chamber as the Greens. To me, it beggars belief that, somehow, the Greens party are now supporting individual freedoms in Australia. There is not a totalitarian regime—there is not a version of communism or Marxism or Leninism or Trotskyism or any other 'ism' that they've had—that they've never supported. They love totalitarian governments, and now we're expected to believe that somehow they're against big, centralised government. These are the people who want to nationalise industry in this country. These are the people who want to condemn those who have a different point of view as having hate speech, these are the people who encourage protesters to glue themselves to bitumen and bring traffic to a halt in the name of their own totalitarian ideology, and yet somehow we're meant to believe today that they're the champions of freedom in this place. Give us a break! It's extraordinary.

Senator Patrick, you've got my vote on this, but, really, you're making it very, very difficult when we have to have bedfellows like the Greens supporting an inquiry into the Communist Party of China. Perhaps—just perhaps—they're looking for a better blueprint to implement their own policy in this country, where they can take it over. But the simple fact is that Senator Patrick has a very good point. I understand how delicate this matter is for the government and the opposition. The Chinese government is a very important trading partner and a very important contributor to the Australian economy, and we don't want to jeopardise that. But I come back to this: the risk for Australia or the risk for any business or exporting nation if it is reliant on a single customer for its livelihood, the wellbeing of its business, the financial probity of its business or the success of its business is that the customer owns the business, because you cannot exist without it. Quite frankly, that is my concern.

My concern is that the Australian economy is becoming too reliant on the massive Chinese market. Not only is it in the area of our mining exports, where we value-add too little here and we just ship it off to China, principally, but we're also seeing it in our food supply industry, we're seeing it in our agricultural industries, we're seeing it in our education industry and we're seeing it, unfortunately, in our political industry. I hate to describe politics as an industry, but it's clearly an industry for some. What's been going on in New South Wales with the Chinese diaspora pumping bags full of cash into the Labor Party, and perhaps others, should fill us with concern. I don't buy the fact that, because a couple of senators have been drummed out of this place or because ICAC has pushed out a Labor state director or secretary, the problems have fully been uncovered. Let us not gild the lily. People don't give you $100,000 cash in a bag, after making billions as recipients of largesse of the Communist Party of China, and throw it into Australian politics for no reason. They do it for a reason. It is to gain access or influence, and we've seen just how damning that can be on individuals. We've had some in this place. There are many more, I suspect, around the rest of the country. But we don't know what we don't know.

The very starting point in all of this, as far as I'm concerned, is to establish exactly the facts about how the agencies of the Chinese government, whether they are commercial agencies or state funded or endorsed ideas, are impacting our economy. How many people are coming here and using the soft student visa program as a backdoor way of gaining permanent residency? How are they influencing our educational institutions to revise history and gloss over the 100 million or so deaths that were part of the revolution? How is it that they're saying that this is just another version of capitalism when people are oppressed and have their organs allegedly harvested, genocidal claims are being made and whole swathes of individual racial or religious groups are being interned and killed? We don't know. But what we do know is that we're seeing some of that activity here in Australia. We're hearing reports about people being threatened and intimidated and our businesses being influenced. Are those reports true?

I don't know, but I'd like to get to a starting point, and that's what this inquiry would do.

The numbers are clearly against us, but—as distasteful as it will be!—I will sit with the Greens, probably at the furthest end of the chamber to make it comfortable for both me and them—