The China challenge

The government’s changed posture on China represents its most fundamental and profound policy shift in a decade, argues Christian Porter as he delivers his valedictory speech.

The following is an edited extract of Christian Porter’s valedictory speech to parliament.

When I first spoke here, nine years ago, I thought that the great challenge of our time was China's economic rise and that this remarkable transformation would mean that Australia would be in the centre of a region of dynamic rise and fall. I think I got that assessment mostly, if a little naively, right nine years ago. The fact is that great dynamic that's been set in a play by China's rise is far from resolved, and as my final contribution to our parliament, being here, which I have enjoyed so much, I want to make some leaving comments about our relationship with China, having had the benefit of a decade at the coalface of the critical issue.

This is the end of 14 years of politics for me. I came into state politics 14 years ago as a 37-year-old with a surplus of enthusiasm over wisdom. Whereas some people wait political lifetimes to serve in a cabinet or even be in government, I've had the great fortune to spend almost all my time since then in cabinet positions, and I spent only four months in opposition. I used to lecture Michael Keenan about how tough opposition was. He found that enormously annoying! I owe great thanks to Colin Barnett and Tony Abbott, the two leaders that gave me my start, and both are people that I admire enormously.

One thing I would say about time in politics in this place, and this may ring true to some of you here, is that time in politics does not run like time outside politics. It is genuinely like being near a black hole, for sci-fi fans: the closer you get to the epicentre of government, the more years of experience you feel get compressed into months. Time actually runs strangely in Parliament House, particularly late at night when that tick, tick, tick goes on. You can come out of a single intense week here, like those swirling mad weeks when leadership spills occur, and you can feel like you've actually been lost in space, like you're adrift. They seem to go on forever those weeks, and you are genuinely surprised when you come out of the building into the sunlight, as if you'd never see it again. The closer you get to the centre of things here, the more we age in dog years, unfortunately. The fact is that in this job you do a lot of city miles. You age hard. You lose paint, and I think maybe if you don't and if you don't become a target for the other side then you're not trying hard enough in your job. That's what it's about.

When you leave a job that's that intense, you naturally ask yourself: 'Well, was it all worth it?' My answer is absolutely yes. Yes, if you get to do as many worthwhile things as you possibly can in the time that you have. I succumbed in politics to the instinct to bite off more than I could chew, and I chewed until I was exhausted. That's not always a bad thing, because time is always shorter than you think it will be. It's almost without exception in life that you know when you're doing something for the first time. But, with few exceptions, the reverse is always true. And it's a melancholy truth that, very often, you just never know when it will be the last time in your life that you do the thing you're doing. Very often, you just never know. That unpredictability in life, not even knowing whether something as simple as talking to a loved one will be the last time it's ever done, is doubly unpredictable in modern politics. You always live in hope that there'll be more time, but in politics you never know if it'll be your last time at the dispatch box, at a national security committee or in cabinet. So biting off more than you can chew, I think, has its benefits. I think it was Peter Costello who said that we are, all of us, only one sentence away from the end of our career. And it's so true.

The first task that I set myself to when I got here was to try and fix Western Australia's GST distribution. Having been a state Treasurer, I came to the view that the old system, which would've seen WA eventually fall to fewer than zero cents in the dollar for its GST share, was totally unfair and totally counterproductive. It was a system that punished a state that had made the hard effort over decades to grow a resources industry. Obviously, the reason this major problem was so hard to fix was all of my good friends and Liberal colleagues from the eastern states. Of course, we love you all, and there are many good people from the eastern states — which is something Western Australia is coming to recognise now that you're all allowed back in — but in this place you all outnumber us about 10 to one. I think it's fair to say that, good people though you all are from the east, most of my eastern states colleagues had all the enthusiasm for helping fix the GST distribution that a turkey has for early Christmas! It was a hard sell. In moving from state to federal politics, I made a decision that it was better, at least, to try and fix the problem from the inside, where the fixing was at least theoretically possible, than complain endlessly from the outside.

My first step on the road to try and effect that change did not go very well at all. It was in the party room. It was the first time I ever spoke in the party room, and it was to put the importance and urgency of the issue in an essentially unwarned and unscripted way to then Treasurer Joe Hockey. I did so with all the genuine enthusiastic naivety of a person who'd been in the job for five minutes, and that sort of full-frontal putting of the issue to the newly ascendant Treasurer Joe Hockey, without any forewarning, while he was preparing for his first budget and with other things clearly on his mind, may not have been the most subtle or advisable start to that campaign. It went very poorly. It did at least get the issue on his radar, though.

After you have a poor start like that trying to effect change, you learn pretty quickly how things actually work in this place. You've got to get as far in the tent as you possibly can, as close to the four or five people who can actually effect the change as you can. Better still, become one of them. That helps. In the end, it requires massive, grinding, ongoing effort. Ultimately with the GST, it was a very small group who really made that change happen, and it took that very small group five years after the 2013 election to fix the problem. Right now, that fix, which is something I am very proud of, means that WA this year is $4.4 billion better off. That's in one year.

Had the system not been fixed, rather than the present floor that we instituted of 70 cents in the dollar, WA this year would've dropped to 16 cents in the dollar, and in the not-too-distant future you would've had a mad situation where WA would've been allocated a negative share of the GST pool, which would've been insane. Fixing that and being a part of the small group inside the tent that fixed that problem was a wonderful thing that I will always look back on with great pride. At the forefront of that fix were the then-Treasurer and now Prime Minister and the then-Minister for Finance, Mathias Cormann. Both the Prime Minister and Mathias were and are great friends, and that project was a massive feat. I thank them for everything they did in that.

It was also a lesson about how things really change in this place. They change over time. You have a few key movers convincing others of the need and the wisdom for change, room after room. You test one alternative after the other, Excel spreadsheet after excel spreadsheet. It's not a very glamorous process. You also come to understand how it is in these smaller groups: the smaller the group that actually achieves the change, and puts in the grinding work to achieve it, usually correlates inversely to the huge number of people who end up claiming credit for it. As Kennedy said, success has a thousand fathers and failure is an orphan, and that is another very true thing about this place.

In the Social Services portfolio, I was part of a small team with my very good friend Alan Tudge, and we made great changes — a fundamental shift, which sounds obvious, to measuring the longitudinal results of all of the different policy settings on one single key metric: does it break up welfare cycles, cycles of dependency? That fundamental shift helped us as a government get to the lowest welfare dependency in Australia since the 1980s. That's just remarkable. It was phenomenal to be a part of that, to be in the middle of it.

The other phenomenal thing to have been a part of over the last decade was the long reshaping of our policy with respect to China. There was specific work that I did as Attorney-General redrawing Australia's espionage and foreign interference laws, essentially from the ground up. That's something that I was very proud to be in the centre of. But it was just one, visible part of a more fundamental change. Now that there is less need, for me at least, to be diplomatic, I can explain it in plain terms.

In a first speech in this place, you'll get some things right and you'll get some things wrong. When I came to this place, in my first speech I saw Chinese growth as the greatest challenge that we face as a nation. Back then, as many did at the time — particularly Western Australians, because we sell a lot of stuff to China — I saw the Australian risk-benefit analysis with China as falling substantially on the benefit side of the ledger. I saw it as a largely positive relationship between sort of mercantile frenemies. That assessment may have been a bit more true nine years ago than it is now — there's been a lot of change inside China — although I think even that is doubtful, but I am absolutely convinced now, a decade later, that that view about the ledger being on the benefit side, not the risk side, is totally wrong.

The truth became very clear to me early in my time in this place that the change in China, and in China's capability, has created a massive risk for Australia — as big a risk as we have ever faced. Under this government, that is a risk that we've been doing our best to understand, to prepare for and mitigate — sometimes visibly and loudly, sometimes quietly and securely. The best explanation of that risk came to me in a conversation that I had with a senior member of the US intelligence community in 2017. I just want to relay that conversation here.

This person was very smart. He was lamenting the pointlessness of that artful, nuanced, intellectual foreign policy conversation that dominates far too much time for so many bureaucrats and foreign policy elites, the sort of consuming focus on the 'whys' of change, very often the why of the big political change that happened last week without Western democracies knowing that it was going to happen or being prepared for it — this sort of artful, intellectual conversation: 'Why has China changed so much in the last decade? Why does the new form of the Chinese autocracy adopt its particular position in relation to the first island chain, the South China Sea or the Solomon Islands?' Then they wash and rinse the diplomatic aperitif glass and just repeat the discussion again and again and again. It's the pointless search for non-existent rationality in the brutal world of reality.

The person I was speaking to made the obvious rationalist point that, in all of the history of the geopolitics of autocracies, of empires, motive is a much less reliable indicator of threat than capability is. He drew the comparison to centuries of academic analysis of Hadrian's Wall. Why would an emperor end up in a position where he had to instruct three Roman legions to build and station a 120-kilometre-long wall at what was then the edge of the known world? The whys to that expansion are really hard to make strategic or long-term economic sense of — then or now. Academics do PhDs on this stuff. Punishment for Britain's support of the Gauls, economic chasing of zinc, copper, iron — they're all reasons that might have been part of the motivating fog for actions. I would say, with all due respect to the Scottish, that I'm pretty sure it didn't make any sense to the poor centurions who were stuck on top of this thing. It was the edge of the world.

But why were they there? Ultimately they were there because they could be there. They had the capability to be there. They were there because the autocratic leadership of a massive economic power was unrestrained by the tempering features of a democratic population, who generally demonstrate reticence to get involved too far away from home. The Romans were there for the same reason that China is now in the Solomon Islands — because they could be. It is as simple as that. Autocratic powers who have experienced massive economic growth and expansion almost invariably tend to push their political power to the edge of their strategic military capability. And, in the simplest terms, our world's capability balance is changing radically. Just, for example, the ability of any nation to unfairly obstruct a freely navigated shipping lane has been fundamentally limited for the last 80 years by the ability of a US carrier group to go essentially unimpeded to any stretch of ocean in the world. And many here would have had the experience that you only get in this job of landing on the deck of a Nimitz class carrier. That is as 'wow' as it ever gets. But, amongst their other military advancements, China is about to develop — or likely has already developed — the capability, with a hypersonic missile, to threaten the authority a $10 billion US Nimitz class carrier with a comparatively cheap, conventional kinetic weapon that can reach a target at sustained speeds of eight times the speed of sound. So that changes the dynamic literally overnight.

And I leave this place having been part of a small but now very substantial group who have come to see the reality of this strategic risk — its immediacy, its peril and the menace that it offers. And they are preparing as best and as thoroughly as they can against it. You can call these people rationalists; you can call them hawks — I know Andrew Hastie likes 'Wolverines' because it's cooler. It doesn't matter what you call them. These people were very few in number 10 years ago when I arrived here, very few in number. That was in government and in the key domains of the Public Service. But, in this government today, the rationalists now shape our preparedness for the very high risk of uncertain times ahead. And that, to me, has been the biggest and most important change in government thinking in the last decade that I've lived through and been a part of. It's been a major, somewhat convulsive change, on my side of politics. It's been aided by a few people on the Labor side — the late Kimberley Kitching, the retiring Anthony Byrne, and a few others. But, and I say this respectfully, the other side of politics hasn't gone through the evolution in its thinking on this issue that we have. And I think you need to. But time will tell.

Just how fundamental that change is — well, think about the fact that, not that long ago, it seemed like a very normal thing to bring an extradition treaty with China to the Coalition foreign policy backbench committee. That seemed normal. It was met there by two early Wolverines, Andrew Hastie and Senator James Paterson. As I said, 'wolverine' suits those two much more than 'rationalist'. They gave that extradition treaty the same response Joe Hockey gave my GST intervention. But things have changed. Turning the direction of this part of the ship of state has happened, like most important change, grindingly, portfolio after portfolio, NSC meeting after NSC meeting, issue after issue. It happened slower I think perhaps than it should have done, but it has happened. It's been the most fundamental and profound change in government in the last decade. I am very proud to have been part of that, particularly alongside my good friend Peter Dutton, and others.

If more evidence were needed, the lessons unfolding in Europe for our own region must be, 'Do not enfeeble yourself in the face of foreseeable risk.' Australia is, by any measure, a privileged place. Things here are just so much better than virtually everywhere else on earth, and things here are so much better for all of us than they have been for virtually every other person who has lived at any previous time in human history. We're all so privileged to be here, to live here, as we do. And yet we're falling into this cycle, which Europe is much deeper in than we're in, where we're increasingly preoccupied with the identity politics of every imaginable boutique type. We're disproportionately engaged in arguments where one group of people try to signal virtue by arguing that they're somewhat less, or others are somewhat more, privileged than they are. And at worst there's become this regularisation in the abandonment of fundamental, foundational Western principles — the things that have made us privileged: free speech, due process, free association. Too regularly they just get tossed aside, sometimes in this place — tossed aside when it becomes too hard in the daily news cycle to resist the demand to abandon them to produce some other outcome desired by the best organised and noisiest interests of the day.

There's an old saying that tough times make for strong people, strong people create good times, good times create weak people, and that creates hard times. None of us want to see those hard times befall our country. We need to actually stand up day by day for the fundamental values that have made us a strong country, otherwise those tough times will be a cycle that gets fulfilled. A few weeks ago culture wars were the issue of the day in Europe, and now they have an actual war and all of the horror that that brings. It's almost inconceivable that, after the horrors of the 20th century, that's happened again. And the weakness of European democracies has been an undeniable problem.

Christian Porter is the retiring Federal Member for Pearce and a former Cabinet Minister. This is an edited extract of his valedictory speech.