Robert’s bone-headed veto on research into China | Australian Financial Review

The following statement was given to the Australian Financial Review on 6 January 2022:

I am aware of one of these vetoed proposals, ‘National Forgetting and Local Remembering: Memory Politics in Modern China’. The grant would have funded research into ‘the Chinese official discourses of revolution, war and economic reform in order to enhance our knowledge of how state interpretations of these periods have changed’ and analyse which perspectives have been ‘erased and reconstructed by the Communist Party in order to fulfil political, economic and diplomatic goals’. It would also have assessed the degrees to which ordinary Chinese citizens have accepted these histories.

 Australia’s future in our region hinges on clear-headed analysis of how the Chinese party-state works. The national interest case for researching this topic is obvious.

 Official history is extremely important in the Chinese system. The Chinese Communist Party’s objectives in this century are directly reflected by revisions to official history. The Chinese public’s response to these changes is a useful gauge of the party’s domestic standing, and therefore its ability to carry out these objectives. If anything, the shape of the research proposal is such that it would likely produce conclusions describing the political manipulation of truth.

Australians may be familiar with the party’s ‘century of national humiliation’ narrative, which continues to influence Chinese foreign and domestic policy. But this is just one piece of a complex puzzle. Only last year, the Fifth Plenum produced the first formal resolution on party history since the 1980s, elevating Xi Jinping personally and the philosophy of “Xi Jinping Thought” as historical truths that are beyond internal critique. We need as much good scholarship in this area as possible to inform the shape of foreign policy.

Stuart Robert’s decision is both baffling and self-defeating. It is consistent with the Morrison government’s politically partisan, professionally immature, neo-McCarthyist approach to any Australian seeking to learn more about the precise nature of the China challenge.

Stuart Robert is the single most boneheaded minister in Morrison’s cabinet of Neanderthals. It is extraordinary that this village idiot is now the commonwealth Minister for Education, let alone that he is being allowed to politically interfere in the independent processes put in place to approve higher education research grants. Furthermore, given his scandal-plagued record, he should not be in the cabinet. Everyone knows Robert is only there because of Morrison’s cronyism and Robert’s status as a major party fundraiser.

This is clearly a juvenile pre-election ploy by Robert to appear, like Dutton, to be hairy-chested on all things related to China – whatever the detail – and let the national interest be damned.