Speech notes from the address to the ACETCA Gala Dinner
27 June 2025
E&OE
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It’s good to be here, marking ten years since the Abbott government finalised the landmark trade deal between Australia and China, thanks to the prodigious work of Andrew Robb, our best ever trade minister.
And also to celebrate the contribution that Chinese-born people and their descendants have made to modern Australia; and to acknowledge that people can come to this country from anywhere in the world and be first class Australians by joining in and “having a go”.
Chinese people first came here in large numbers during the Gold Rush. By the late 1850s, it’s thought there were about 50,000 Chinese gold miners in Australia – and given that our settler population was then about a million, that means we were up to 5 per cent Chinese.
Many left after the Gold Rush, but many stayed. One of them, Lowe Kong Meng, was a founding director of the Commercial Bank of Australasia and a leading Melbourne businessmen. With others, in 1879, Lowe published a pamphlet, The Chinese Question, declaring that “human nature is human nature all the world over” and that the lives of Chinese people in Australia would soon “approximate to those of (their) neighbours”.
It was an early instance of the universalism, and sense of common humanity, that came to characterise this country. Senator Thomas Bakhap served in the federation parliaments. Trooper Yin Gan was one of the first ashore at Gallipoli and sniper Billy Sing was our most deadly soldier of the Great War.
In more recent times, especially after Tiananmen Square, there’s been a further influx of Chinese people: from Hong Kong, from Taiwan, from Malaysia and Indonesia, and from China itself. People of Chinese ancestry are again about 5 per cent of our total population and key participants in all parts of our society.
There’s our foreign minister Penny Wong; there’s my former colleague Bill O’Chee; and there’s Helen Sham-Ho, the first Chinese-born member of an Australian parliament; and Senator Bin Tchen, the first Chinese born member of the federal parliament; incidentally both Liberals.
I admire and respect all the Chinese people who’ve become Australians and who’ve blended so well into what’s a broadly Anglo-Celtic culture with a Judaeo-Christian ethos.
As PM, whenever I met foreign leaders, I would try to a begin a relationship by volunteering an observation that was true, that was consistent with my beliefs, and that I knew they would really like to hear. With Xi Jinping, I said that the movement of a half billion Chinese from the third world to the middle class, in scarcely a generation, was the biggest advance in human well-being in all history, and a great credit to the Chinese people and government.
And there’s no doubt that China’s rise has been good for the world. In Australia, we gained by supplying China’s needs for coal, gas and iron ore – and in return benefited from inexpensive, high quality consumer goods.
As PM, I had Australia join the Beijing-sponsored Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, after some changes to its governance, and against the wishes of the US and Japan. When MH370 plunged into the southern Indian Ocean, with some 150 Chinese citizens on board, Australia led the recovery effort, with a large navy and airforce deployment.
When President Xi addressed the Australian parliament and declared, in the official English version, that China would be “fully democratic by mid century”, even accepting democracy’s different meanings, it was perhaps the high point of China’s engagement with the West.
And then there was the China-Australia free trade deal that had been languishing since John Howard’s time, that my government concluded: it was the first deal that Beijing had done in a decade, its only deal with a G20 country, and the best deal that China had ever done.
And yet, for a time, Beijing chose to boycot some $20 billion in exports, after Australia’s call for an independent enquiry into the Wuhan virus, demonstrating that political considerations could trump commercial ones. Then in late 2020, the Chinese embassy in Canberra issued a list of 14 demands: essentially that Australia accept all Chinese investment, accept all Chinese immigrants, end the US alliance, and cease criticising Beijing.
That, alas, was the low point.
So where does that leave our country, and where does that leave Australians of Chinese descent?
Obviously, as a nation, we want the best possible relationship with Beijing. The Albanese government’s formulation is that we will “cooperate where we can, disagree where we must, and engage in the national interest”. This is a toned down version of former Secretary of State Blinken’s formula that the US would “cooperate where we can, compete where we should, and confront where we must”.
Australia should keep trading; we should keep accepting students, certainly for the humanities; we should keep accepting highly skilled immigrants, and the dependents of Australian citizens. But for critical supply chains, we have to take care with imports that could be turned on and off like a tap.
We must protest strongly when Australian navy divers are deliberately injured or when warships conduct live fire exercises off our coast without suitable notice. And Australia does need to be militarily stronger, with more ships, more planes, more personnel, more drones, and more missiles, so that we can be a better ally and stronger friend.
If a stronger military is right for China, and for others, it’s right for us too. We have to be in a position to be firm, even with a superpower.
Over time, Australians of Chinese background have fully integrated and assimilated into the Australian way of life and judge global issues from an Australian perspective. Chinese Australians have moved seamlessly into the workplaces, the neighbourhoods, and the sporting and community groups of their fellow Australians.
I’m sure they’ve applauded China’s rise and the better material life that’s meant for the Chinese people, and have been pleased to see China treated with respect. But most, I’m equally sure, would hope for a renewal of the liberalisation that began under Deng Xiaoping; and would hope that China might be history’s most benign superpower – a partner, even, in the Pax Americana, under which the world has become more free, more fair, more rich, and more safe, for more people than ever before.
In an immigrant society, committed to respecting fundamental human rights, it’s only natural that sometimes people might have dual loyalties and should not wish to choose between their new home and their old one. My hope, is that Beijing will never demand more of Australia than a self-respecting sovereign nation can ever give, and force on Chinese Australians an invidious choice.
Still, all of you, by choosing to join Team Australia, have made us a larger, richer, stronger country. And that’s what we celebrate tonight, a decade on from our trade deal. You have proven that Chinese people can be both richer and freer, and that there are many places Chinese people can go in order to succeed, often beyond their wildest dreams.