Australia's China ties in focus as election rivals hunt for votes

Irish Times

25-04-2025

Australian
prime minister
Anthony Albanese
spent Easter Monday at the Golden Lily restaurant, posting photographs on Facebook with foreign minister Penny Wong showing a Lazy Susan laden with
Chinese
food.
Albanese's choice of dining venue – in Box Hill, a Melbourne suburb where about 30 per cent of residents were born in China – was a reminder that Australia's May 3rd election could turn on which leader voters think is best equipped to manage foreign relations amid the turmoil of
Donald Trump
's trade war.
While the race has largely been fought on domestic cost-of-living issues, it also comes as Australia is grappling with how to balance its close ties to the US, its primary security patron, with China, its largest trading partner, especially as Trump has ratcheted up tensions with Beijing and applied more pressure to some of Washington's closest allies.
'The key part of the debate is how Australia charts a path with our key security allies at a time when Australians see an ongoing threat from China,' said Ryan Neelam, director of public opinion and foreign policy at the Lowy Institute think tank in Sydney.
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Albanese and his conservative opponent, Liberal Party leader Peter Dutton, are both trying to appeal to Chinese-Australian voters, who have a heavy presence in a clutch of closely contested seats that could prove pivotal in a tight race.
Australia's Liberal Party leader Peter Dutton. Photograph: David Gray/AFP via Getty Images
China loomed over Australia's last election in 2022, when the incumbent Liberal-led coalition adopted an ultra-hawkish approach to Beijing. A large swing in seats with a high proportion of Chinese Australians helped deliver victory to Albanese's Labor Party, which took a more conciliatory line.
The Liberals' 2022 anti-China stance was 'a real misread', said Osmond Chiu, a research fellow at the Per Capita think tank.
Dutton, a combative former defence minister who three years ago told Australians to 'prepare for war', has since dramatically softened his tone. He now describes himself as 'pro-China', and also visited Box Hill, where he pledged to provide A$250,000 (€140,000) to future lunar new year fireworks celebrations.
Dutton was trying to 'swing the pendulum' of Chinese-Australian voters back to his party, Chiu added.
'In 2022, the [then governing Liberal] coalition tried to put national security as the major issue,' he said. 'But in 2025, it is more about the US. It's a different dynamic.'
Trump's hostility to allies including Canada, Ukraine and Greenland, and barrage of tariffs have rattled Australians and transformed the vote into a test of how smoothly the country can manage relations with Washington.
His aggressive stance on China – maintaining tariffs of 145 per cent even as he has suspended levies elsewhere – have also created an uncomfortable situation for Australia, which relies on Beijing to take more than 25 per cent of its exports.
A Lowy poll this month found voters were split on whether Albanese or Dutton would be better at handling Trump, but 41 per cent preferred the Labor leader on foreign policy, compared with 29 per cent for Dutton.
Overall, voters' trust in the US to act responsibly had dropped to a 20-year low.
Strikingly, Albanese has a sizeable lead over Dutton in dealing with China's leader Xi Jinping.
One of the biggest achievements of the Labor prime minister's term has been a rapprochement with Beijing, which has lifted punitive tariffs on Australian goods including coal, wine, barley and rock lobsters that were imposed in 2020 after a Liberal administration called for an international investigation into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Tensions have jumped recently, however, after the Chinese navy conducted live-fire tests off Australia's east coast. Public debate has also picked up steam over a Chinese-owned company controlling the port in Darwin, where US soldiers are based.
Nowhere is that pressure more felt than among Chinese Australians. About 5.5 per cent of the population is of Chinese ancestry, drawing on the descendants of immigrants during the gold rush in the 1800s as well as newer arrivals from mainland China as well as Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore.
The community is particularly strongly represented in some of the country's most closely contested seats in Sydney and Melbourne that could help determine the balance of power.
Wanning Sun, deputy director at the Australia-China Relations Institute at the University of Technology Sydney, said many Chinese-Australian voters might prioritise economic concerns, but there was still a 'very vivid memory' of hostility towards the community during the pandemic.
Dutton's bellicose rhetoric had made an impression, she added, forcing the opposition leader into 'damage control' in an effort to win back Chinese-Australian voters' trust.
Chiu at Per Capita said 'concern about China' had been a 'red meat' issue for the Liberal party's base in recent years. But the backlash in the 2022 campaign demonstrated that such a hardline attitude could tip the result in marginal urban seats.
'Chinese-Australian voters will be pivotal and could determine whether it's going to be a majority or minority government,' he said. − Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025