THE AUKUS deal was more about the United States basing submarines, ships and bombers in the Top End than it was about Australia getting nuclear submarines, retired diplomat turned commentator Bruce Haigh told the Red Flag Dinner in Newcastle on Saturday night.
Describing himself as a trenchant critic of the Morrison government, Mr Haigh had a sympathetic audience at the Hunter Broad Left gathering, speaking on his advertised topic, China, and taking a stream of questions.
Mr Haigh spoke scathingly of the federal government, especially Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Defence Minister Peter Dutton.
He said that while China "wasn't perfect", it was not as repressive as the Australian media made out.
The Chinese people might not be completely happy but they were satisfied with their government.
Asked what China wanted, Mr Haigh said it wanted to "keep its population together" and to "show the world that what happened in colonial times was humiliating". He said President Xi Jinping saw Chairman Mao as "a father figure for the nation to look up to" and while we "might think that was misguided", it suited his purposes.
He said China's recent crackdown on its billionaires was because President Xi "saw capitalism getting out of control and hurting the Communist state".
He "tightened up on the cult of the individual" and did not want China "Hollywoodised".
Perhaps surprisingly, he described the controversy over Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai as one of Xi's biggest threats, because it was difficult to tell how young Chinese would react to her story. He said the former vice-president she accused of raping her, Zhang Gaoli, should apologise and the proper authorities investigate. Speculating on what might happen, he said China may end up forcing her to leave the country, as Russia did to novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Mr Haigh was born at the Mater Hospital and lived his early years in Newcastle. He served for 22 years with the Department of Foreign Affairs. His postings included South Africa, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Sri Lanka.
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His behind-the-scenes work as a diplomat in South Africa in the late 1970s was portrayed by actor John Hargreaves in the 1987 film Cry Freedom.
He sat on the Refugee Review Tribunal from 1995 to 2000.
Now 76 and the author of two books on Australia's international relations, he has been published in various media outlets but says his voice is "no longer in fashion".
Mr Haigh said the AUKUS deal meant "our sovereignty has been compromised". He said it would mean more B52 bombers based in the Northern Territory, US submarines in Fremantle and 6000 more marines in Darwin, which with families would take the total to 20,000 people.
He said Pine Gap had already made us a target and would be the first thing China would go for if war began. He said the Americans were about to almost double the size of the spy base, with another 38 radar discs being installed.
Mr Haigh said American money was helping to fund the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a Canberra-based think-tank set up in 2001 under John Howard with claims of being "independent".
ASPI says Canberra provides more than 60 per cent of its funding and "foreign" governments 18 per cent but Mr Haigh said investigators had uncovered big increases in funding from the US government and arms manufacturers, much of it tied to projects attacking China.
He said ASPI "wrote" Mr Dutton's strident speech on China last week, pointing to a "giveway" line about Australia's defence spending being the equivalent of what it had been in 1938, a line ASPI had used repeatedly.
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He said Australia could re-set its relations with China if Labor won the next election, and Anthony Albanese as prime minister issued a "mea culpa" apology for Mr Morrison's "ill-founded comments" on COVID and Wuhan, which he said were designed to "get up President Xi's nose".
He said the West kept on about "the rules based system" but from China's perspective that system was an American set of rules drafted after WWII and it was time to write some new rules because the world had changed.
Asked whether China had any "residual goodwill" towards Australia because of Gough Whitlam's early recognition of China over Taiwan, Mr Haigh said some older Chinese remembered but the younger generation did not.
He said Australian universities would struggle to regain Chinese students because we were now like South Africa at the time of apartheid.
