Deal struck by previous Liberal premier Colin Barnett is with same agency as Victoria’s vetoed belt and road project.
The Morrison government faces calls to cancel an agreement between Western Australia and the same Chinese government agency that was the partner in the now-vetoed Victorian belt and road deals.
Under the agreement, originally struck by previous Liberal premier Colin Barnett, WA and China’s National Development and Reform Commission pledged to work together to find investment opportunities, including infrastructure and in the state’s significant resources sector.
Some of the language in the agreement, signed in 2011, is mirrored in the more recent belt and road initiative (BRI)-specific agreements struck by the Victorian Labor premier Daniel Andrews. Those Victorian deals were deemed by the foreign minister, Marise Payne, to be “inconsistent with Australia’s foreign policy or adverse to our foreign relations”.
The federal government declined to comment when asked whether it was also considering cancelling the WA deal. But Guardian Australia has learned it is yet to raise any specific concerns with the WA government.
The deal is listed on a newly created federal register of agreements but the section detailing any decision by Payne is currently blank.
The Labor senator Kimberley Kitching led the calls for an explanation, saying now that the government had the power to cancel such agreements “the onus is solely on them to explain to the public whether this deal is in Australia’s best interests”.
“If they cannot do this, and also refuse to act, then this is just another example of their actions failing to match their tough rhetoric,” she said.
Kitching, a co-chair of the hawkish Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, said the partner body in the WA agreement was a Chinese Communist party agency that “oversees the administration of the CCP’s repressive social credit system”.
“Knowing this, I can’t imagine that the people of Western Australia would be pleased with the agreement their former Liberal state government entered into,” she said.
The Liberal backbench senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells said: “Like the Victoria BRI, the 2011 agreement between WA and the communist regime in China should be cancelled.”
Fierravanti-Wells argued the foreign relations legislation that passed the parliament last year was “defective in that it excludes arrangements that the WA government may have entered into with ‘private corporations’”.
“These are the arrangements which are the most troubling and involve strategic assets of the kind referred to in the 2011 WA/CCP agreement,” she said.
“The operation of China’s company and national security laws mean that the CCP exercises effective control over both state-owned entities and Chinese ‘private’ companies.”
The Liberal backbench MP and intelligence committee member Tim Wilson said he welcomed the fact that “agreements from a number of countries have been reviewed and cancelled” since the establishment of the register.
“Any agreement that falls foul of the national interest should attract the same scrutiny from competent authorities,” Wilson said.
While the government is not commenting on the WA agreement, Guardian Australia understands Payne will consider agreements notified by the states on a case-by-case basis will not pre-empt any potential decision under the scheme.
The lack of a decision one way or another does not mean it could not occur down the track, because the veto laws give the foreign minister broad powers to determine what goes against Australia’s foreign policy. Officials have previously said there needed to be flexibility in the laws because foreign policy is not “static”.
A decision to cancel the agreement could raise tensions with the WA Labor premier, Mark McGowan, who has emphasised the importance to his state of trade with China and won a thumping victory in this year’s state election.
A WA government spokesperson confirmed to Guardian Australia that it had “not received any questions from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade or other federal government agencies about this agreement”.
The spokesperson noted the agreement – promoting investment cooperation in the areas of mining, energy, agriculture and infrastructure – “was put in place a decade ago, under the previous Liberal National government”.
“China is Western Australia’s largest export market, accounting for 56% of the state’s goods exports in 2020,” the WA government spokesperson said.
The use of the new foreign veto powers could add to tensions in the relationship between China and Australia, with Beijing already threatening to take further actions in response to last month’s veto of the two Victorian belt and road agreements.
The government also confirmed this week the defence department was separately reviewing the long-term lease of the Port of Darwin to a Chinese company, Landbridge, to consider any security concerns.
Fierravanti-Wells said she had questioned the NT government during the Senate inquiry into the foreign relations legislation “about the nature and extent of compensation in the event that the lease of the Port of Darwin was declared invalid by the commonwealth”.
“Depending on the terms of the lease, which to date have not been publicly released, I would envisage some form of just compensation would probably be payable by the commonwealth,” she said.
Payne flew out of Australia on Tuesday bound for London, where she was due to meet with the foreign and development ministers of the G7 countries for talks that will discuss the increasing strategic competition between China and the US.
Australia, India, South Korea, South Africa, and the Asean chair have also been invited to the G7 talks. Payne will then fly to Geneva followed by Washington for the Australian government’s first ministerial, in-person consultations with the Biden administration.
In an oped published by the Australian newspaper, Payne stressed the importance of democracies working together to solve practical problems, saying they wanted to achieve global and regional stability rather than “targeted influence in individual countries that we pick off as notches on our belts”.
The remarks were interpreted as referring to China, although she didn’t name the country.
Last week the Chinese ambassador to Australia, Cheng Jingye, cited “increasing discriminatory restrictions imposed over investment from Chinese enterprises” as an example of “negative moves by the Australian side that has poisoned the atmosphere” in the relationship.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/may/05/coalition-faces-calls-to-cancel-investment-deal-between-western-australia-and-china
