Rex Patrick (SA, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In February 2022, just 15 months away, the People's Republic of China will host the 24th winter Olympic Games. This will be a big moment for China. The attention of the world will be focused on Beijing, the first city ever to have hosted both the summer and winter Olympic Games, having previously hosted the 2008 summer Olympics.

The Olympics are supposed to be an apolitical event, and many people like to think that sport should be separate from politics. But the reality is that sport is, and always has been, inextricably linked to politics, to national pride and to the interests of governments which seek to use sport to boost their prestige domestically and internationally. When China hosted the summer Games in Beijing in 2008, the Chinese Communist Party promoted the occasion as a demonstration of China's new-found status as a global power. The 2008 Games attracted plenty of criticism, especially with regard to China's poor human rights record, including repression in Tibet and the Chinese government's violation of a pledge to allow open media access. However, the Chinese Communist Party went all out to present the Olympics as confirmation of a long-held nationalist dream. Any criticism was denounced as an insult to China.

Many people will remember the highly organised demonstrations of strident Chinese nationalist sentiment that accompanied the Olympic torch relay as it progressed throughout Australia's cities. The 2008 games gave the Chinese Communist Party more leverage to suppress political dissent. Efforts to suppress any political unrest before and during the games contributed directly to the rapid expansion of China's internal security forces, and that all-intrusive power has grown every year since then.

In 2015 Beijing was selected as the host city of the 2022 winter Olympics, beating Almaty in Kazakhstan by just four votes at the International Olympic Committee. The IOC's 2015 decision aroused further concerns and complaints from human rights groups. Two years later, in February 2017, the IOC belatedly introduced human rights principles into its future host city contracts, the agreements between the IOC and the cities chosen to host the Olympic Games. The key provisions of the new host city contracts provide that a host city's national Olympic committee and organising committee for the games agree to prohibit any form of discrimination, to protect and respect all internationally recognised human rights and to implement internationally recognised anticorruption standards. The IOC is to establish a reporting mechanism covering these principles and standards. These principles and arrangements will first apply in the 2024 Olympics in Paris, France.

But where does that leave the 2022 winter Olympics? Beijing has already started the Olympic countdown clock, but the human rights concerns that cast a shadow over the 2008 games have grown a hundredfold. Early last month, more than 180 human rights groups from around the world called on the IOC to pull back from holding the winter Olympic Games in Beijing. Weeks before that, the campaign of US presidential candidate, Joe Biden, declared that the Chinese Communist Party's repression of the Uighur population in Xinjiang amounted to genocide—the gravest charge that can be made under international law. US President Donald Trump's administration is reportedly considering making a similar declaration.

There is no denying the deeply sinister developments in Xinjiang. In what amounts to a massive exercise in political, religious and ethnic cleansing, the Chinese government has forced a massive number of Uighurs, probably upward of a million, into internment camps. It has pressured them to relinquish their language, culture and religion while subjecting them to forms of political indoctrination—something human rights groups have called brain washing. Torture and other brutal punishments are also reportedly widespread. There are also reports of forced sterilisations and abortions as part of a state-sanctioned effort to drive down the Uighur birth rate. Researchers at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute have meticulously documented evidence of the Chinese government subjecting Uighurs to forced labour, including selling that labour to companies across China. This industrial-scale repression is supported by a vast array of identity checks, sensors, cameras and tracking and monitoring technology in what is arguably the world's first high-technology surveillance state. All the while, the Chinese Communist Party churns out propaganda claiming that its policies towards the Uighurs are necessary for national security and warns Western media and governments not to pry into its internal affairs.

Of course, China's human rights violations are not limited to the mass persecution of Uighurs. Across China, President Xi has cracked down on any free expression of opinion, employing the Ministry of State Security to harass, detain and prosecute any person seen to express dissent. We've also seen the effective end of the special status of Hong Kong and the one country, two systems policy—enshrined in international treaties—through the use of the new national security laws to crush democratic freedoms in the territory. China has also cracked down on the international media, and engaged in what amounts to state directed hostage taking. A prominent Chinese Australian writer and a Chinese Australian journalist are amongst those held in arbitrary detention, facing potentially grave national security charges.

These circumstances have led the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China to call on the IOC to reconsider staging the 2022 Games in Beijing. Senator Eric Abetz has also included himself in that call. The standing of the IOC will be gravely harmed if they allow themselves to provide a global, public relations platform for a brutal, authoritarian and, indeed, totalitarian regime that, as Joe Biden rightly says, has engaged in what amounts to genocide. However, we must be realistic about the IOC's keenness to deal with this issue. They are affected by the delay of the Tokyo Olympics to 2021. That will have affected their funding, and they won't have much appetite realistically to call for the Beijing winter Olympics to be moved elsewhere.

We need to think about this. It's my considered view that Australia must take a lead and say 'no' to the winter Olympic Games. After all, the Australian government's current advice to its citizens is that, quite apart from the circumstances of COVID-19, they should not visit or remain in China owing to the risk of arbitrary arrest and detention. Are we seriously thinking of sending media and our athletes and spectators to China under those circumstances? If we think things are going to change, then we're wrong. The circumstances are getting worse and worse in China. President Xi intends to go harder in suppressing dissent and dealing harshly with ethnic minorities in western China.

As I said, there are people already arguing that we shouldn't boycott the winter Olympics. Liberal MP, Dave Sharma, has claimed that any boycott would be counterproductive. Senator Wong, the foreign affairs spokesperson for Labor, has said she wants the Olympics to put a spotlight on China, including its human rights record. I'm more inclined to agree with former Socceroos captain Craig Foster, who has said that while international sporting organisations are not responsible for human rights violations in a host country they are directly responsible if they allow 'mega events to be used to whitewash broad scale abuse occurring under the shadow of the stadia'. Some will say that an international boycott won't be effective—that it won't change China's policies. That could be so, but that's beside the point. The question is whether Australia is prepared to lend legitimacy to a deeply authoritarian and morally bankrupt regime. I don't think we can afford to do that. It would send precisely the wrong message to the world about the values we advocate and support.

Australia should boycott the Beijing winter Olympics, and we should announce that decision soon. We shouldn't leave it to the last minute; we should allow for this to be organised. We should compensate the Australian Olympic Committee and the Olympic Winter Institute of Australia, and we should let our athletes know and support our athletes. We cannot go and stand on the playing fields of a regime responsible for genocide and human rights abuses on a vast scale. Australia should boycott, and take the lead in announcing that decision.