The former foreign minister Julie Bishop has called on the Australian government not to get involved in unnecessary tit-for-tat exchanges with the Chinese government, while predicting the relationship will remain frosty for an extended period.
Bishop, the former deputy Liberal leader, also suggested during an event on Monday evening that it would be unwise to “unnecessarily offend our largest customer”, in a reference to the economic importance of China to Australia.
Speaking just hours after the Morrison government confirmed it was proceeding with its World Trade Organization complaint against China’s tariffs on Australian barley, Bishop noted that Beijing was refusing to engage directly with government ministers – a step that was fundamental to any relationship.
“The infamous Chinese freezer can last for years,” Bishop said during the webinar organised by the Australian National University, of which she now is the chancellor.
“The way for the Australian government forward is to continue to protect our national interest, of course, but avoid the unnecessary media tit-for-tat with Chinese officials.”
Bishop said the government should be patient and wait for “the temperature to cool a bit”. She said there was a need to re-engage with China but predicted it would be “some time before we see a thawing” of the relationship.
“I’m assuming this is what’s happening [but] I would be looking for opportunities to engage across many sectors not just political or government-to-government,” she told the webinar, titled Geopolitical Leadership in a Post-Covid Asia-Pacific.
Addressing the same webinar, the former Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd said the state of the China-Australia relationship was, at least in part, due to Australia’s status as one of America’s closest allies – something with bipartisan support in Canberra.
With the relationship between Washington and Beijing having deteriorated rapidly under the Trump administration, Rudd contended that “we are at a half-century inflection point in terms of US-China”.
He said the Biden administration would probably seek a “strategic restabilisation” with Beijing but that did not equal “normalisation”.
Bishop and Rudd were speaking hours after the trade minister, Dan Tehan, issued a statement confirming Australia would proceed with its challenge against China’s prohibitive tariffs on barley imports, first announced by Beijing in May last year amid a dispute over Australia’s early calls for a Covid-19 international inquiry.
Tehan revealed that there had been dispute-settlement consultations between Australia and China in late January and “while there was constructive engagement on both sides, these consultations did not resolve our concerns”.
He said Australia would request the WTO establish a dispute settlement panel, marking the next phase of the process to attempt to overturn anti-dumping and countervailing duties imposed on Australian barley by China.
In a carefully worded media release, Tehan portrayed the decision to proceed as simply exercising a WTO mechanism “designed to allow members to settle their differences over trade matters in a respectful manner”.
“This decision is an appropriate use of an established system to resolve our differences and is consistent with action Australia has previously taken to address concerns with measures imposed by other trading partners,” he said.
Tehan said the government was committed to defending the interests of Australian barley producers and argued the anti-dumping and countervailing duties imposed by Beijing were “not consistent with China’s WTO obligations”.
“Australia strongly supports the multilateral rules-based trading system, with the WTO at its core. We will continue to work within that system to stand up for the rights of Australian exporters.”
Also on Monday the Australian Senate blocked debate on a motion that would have recognised China’s actions against the Uighur Muslim minority as genocide.
That is despite the Canadian and Dutch parliaments recently adopting such motions, and the Biden administration also upholding a similar determination made by the former Trump administration.
The motion, proposed by independent senator Rex Patrick, stated that the Senate agreed that the People’s Republic of China’s treatment of the Uighurs in the Xinjiang region “constitutes the crime of genocide”.
If passed, the motion would also have called on the PRC “to immediately end torture and abuse in detention centres; abolish its system of mass internment camps, house arrest and forced labour; cease all coercive population control measures; and end the persecution of Uighurs and other religious and ethnic minorities in Xinjiang and elsewhere in China”.
The Senate denied the motion formality – a step often taken to avoid votes on complex foreign policy matters.
That prompted Patrick to seek to suspend standing orders to allow the motion to be debated, a bid that was blocked by the major parties. But the Greens and crossbenchers Jacqui Lambie and Sterling Griff backed Patrick’s attempt to bring on debate of the motion.
The Greens senator Janet Rice said that if given the opportunity the Greens would have supported Patrick’s motion “because the Chinese government’s abuses against the Uighur population are appalling”.
The Coalition senator Jonathon Duniam said the government remained deeply concerned about the situation in Xinjiang and renewed calls for an unfettered independent inquiry by the UN human rights commissioner.
Ramila Chanisheff, president of the Australian Uighur Tangritagh Women’s Association, was one of about 150 community members who rallied outside parliament in Canberra on Monday. Some of them travelled from Victoria, NSW and South Australia.
Chanisheff told Guardian Australia she had been worried that the motion might not pass the Senate, noting that Australia was dependent on China for trade. She said passing such a motion would be one step along a “long journey” of standing alongside other democracies in holding China to account.
“We know that the Australian government and Australians will not stand for genocide,” she said. Chanisheff hoped to meet staff from the office of the foreign minister, Marise Payne, on Tuesday.
In a sign of the ongoing tensions between the two countries, China said in a statement to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva late last week that it was “deeply concerned” by Australia’s operation of offshore detention centres and called for them to be closed immediately.
