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Australia's Prime Minister Anthony Albanese meets with China's President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, November 6, 2023.
Are China-Australia ties boomeranging back?
Anthony Albanese is the first Australian prime minister to visit Beijing since 2016, as both sides signal their readiness to work on their long-running rift. At a meeting on Monday in the Great Hall of the People, Chinese President Xi Jinping said, “the China-Australia relationship has embarked on the right path of improvement and development” after years of trade spats and accusations of political meddling.
As the satirical Australian series “Utopia” illustrates, Canberra has to walk a fine line. China accounts for over a third of Australian trade, and is willing to use that leverage in political disputes. In 2020, when then-Prime Minister Scott Morisson called for an investigation of China’s role in the origin of the COVID-19 virus, Beijing slapped import restrictions on Australian agricultural products. Those remain in place, despite the thaw.
Australians clearly feel threatened by China, after allegations of political interference led Canberra to ban foreign political donations in 2017 and Huawei communications technology in 2018. In a poll this year, 75% of the population say they see China as a military threat in the coming years.
The visit with Albanese seems further proof Beijing has accepted that its aggressive diplomatic tack in the late 2010s was unsustainable. It also bodes well for the summit between Xi and President Biden at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting next week in San Francisco, though the Taiwanese elections in January still loom large in the US-China dynamic.A rainbow is seen behind the Australian flag, the Indigenous flag and the flag of the Torres Strait Islands in Canberra, Friday, July 28, 2023.
Will Australians back Indigenous referendum?
Australians will vote on Saturday in a referendum on whether an Indigenous Voice to Parliament should be enshrined in the constitution. “The Voice,” as it has become known, would establish an advisory body to the government on issues that affect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. Importantly, it would have no legal power to enforce its recommendations.
Background. Indigenous Australians, also known as the First Australians, include hundreds of thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who have lived on what is now Australian territory for thousands of years. Currently, they make up about 3.8% of the country's 26 million people.
For much of the first half of the twentieth century, Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families as part of a government scheme to hasten the disappearance of Indigenous culture. These children, who were often placed in state-run institutions rife with abuse, became known as The Stolen Generation.
Since then, Indigenous Australians have been stuck in a cycle of poverty and are incarcerated at disproportionately high rates, currently making up 32% of the prison population.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, for his part, has been pushing hard for Aussies to vote “yes” in order to address historic wounds and improve living conditions for impoverished Indigenous communities.
But proponents of a “no” vote, including the opposing Liberal Party, say that creating a race-based, unelected body is divisive and will only exacerbate racial divides and have few actionable implications.
In order to pass, a majority of voters and a majority of states (four out of six) will need to vote in favor. No referendum has ever passed without bipartisan support and the latest polls show that this one is unlikely to either.