Cam Slater: Wily Winston Far Too Clever for Bob Carr and David Parker

Former Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr was recently in New Zealand at the behest of the Labour Party and spoke at a meeting organised by them. In his speech he lambasted the Government and Winston Peters for entertaining becoming part of AUKUS.

Which was rather strange, since it was Labour who initiated conversations regarding AUKUS in the first place.

But, by the by, Winston Peters then gave a speech about AUKUS and was asked questions afterwards about Bob Carr’s comments. The Canberra Times reports:

New Zealand is debating involvement in pillar two of the military tie-up, which will see AUKUS members – Australia, the UK and US – developing and sharing advanced warfaring technologies with other nations.

Mr Carr shared his criticisms of the US-led pact on a visit to Wellington in April, calling it “methane-wrapped bulls**t” and saying he admired Kiwi foreign policy as it wasn’t as “gullible to the Americans” as Australia.

On Wednesday night, Mr Peters gave a major foreign policy speech at parliament, where he said NZ was yet to consider collaboration on pillar two as it had not been invited.

Mr Peters followed up with a round of interviews on Thursday morning where he was asked about Mr Carr’s criticism, launching an extraordinary broadside.

“What on earth does he think he’s doing walking into our country and telling us what to do? We would no more do that in Australia than he should do here. That’s the kind of arrogance we don’t like,” Mr Peters told Radio NZ.

Mr Peters called Mr Carr “nothing more than a Chinese puppet”, before suggesting even further alignment in comments AAP has chosen not to republish.

Radio NZ has also edited an uploaded clip of the interview to remove the potentially defamatory remarks.

Canberra Times

This is what is considered a robust political debate under our defamation laws. But apparently Bob Carr is incensed and has threatened to sue Winston Peters for defamation.

Our cowardly legacy media are more interested in Bob Carr’s outrage and threats than what Winston Peters has said, effectively censoring his statement.

But, on cue, along came David Parker who used Question Time to give Winston Peters a free hit on Bob Carr.

Question No. 3—Foreign Affairs3. Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour) to the Minister of Foreign Affairs: Does he stand by his criticisms of the critics of AUKUS, including his statement about Hon Bob Carr that he “is nothing more than a Chinese puppet”?

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS (Minister of Foreign Affairs): Yes, particularly those comments that highlighted the fact that critics don’t know what they don’t know regarding the strategic challenges New Zealand faces; that they malign the agencies of State charged with collecting and analysing, for their Government, intelligence that informs our view about the challenging strategic environment in the Pacific; that Pillar 2 is a technology-sharing mechanism and not a military alliance; that the critics were silent like lambs ever since October 2021, when that member’s Government started considering New Zealand’s involvement with AUKUS—the same Labour Government that sanctioned officials to initiate discussions with AUKUS partners in 2023 but who now act like lions, following the change of Government. And one last thing: as for Bob Carr, it appears we’ve been late to the party. Here, I refer to an article in the Australian Financial Review dated 8 November 2018 that anticipated my remarks. It says, “How Bob Carr became China’s Pawn”. Oh, by the way, can I just finish by saying, look, perhaps with his extensive legal knowledge, the member can explain the difference between a puppet and a pawn.

Hon David Parker: Is the former leader of the ACT Party the Hon Richard Prebble nothing more than a Chinese puppet for writing his recent article entitled “It is lunacy to join a military alliance aimed at our biggest trading partner”?

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: What Mr Prebble is doing is what so many others have done, and which that member and his colleagues, including what former Ministers Andrew Little and the Hon Peeni Henare over there could have done, and including Jacinda Ardern—they could have advised: “We started this conversation way back in September 2021, three years ago.” So if they were informed then and they’ve been silent ever since, it suggests that they’ve got political bias. But in Mr Prebble’s case, he did write a book called I’ve Been Thinking—and I wish you would do that now.

Hon David Parker: Is the former leader of the National Party Don Brash nothing more than a Chinese puppet for writing his article “Why on earth would we join Aukus in any form?”

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: The former leader of the National Party—due to his colleagues being here, I have to say he has many, many skills, and they’re quite exceptional in some cases. But they aren’t in foreign policy.

Hon David Parker: Is the Hon Paul Keating, the former Prime Minister of Australia, nothing more than a Chinese puppet for calling the AUKUS pact “the worst deal in history”?

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: I think that member should watch that former member of the Australian Parliament’s body language and not rely so much upon what he’s saying now. In short, Mr Keating is making comments that his own Labor Party in Parliament, in the Senate, and in the House of Commons in Canberra don’t in any way or shape support; nor do I suspect does the Hon Penny Wong, the Foreign Minister.

Hon David Parker: Why can’t the Minister understand New Zealanders’ concerns about the promotion of AUKUS when, less than two weeks ago, he upped the ante by saying he saw “powerful reasons for New Zealand engaging practically with [AUKUS]”?

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: Can I tell that member that one of the parts about having a legal training is you make sure you put the rider on it, and that very paragraph closes with the words “when the parties mutually agree that the time is appropriate”. We set out very clearly last night that we haven’t even had a chance to consider the matters that they began their discussion on or conclude them, or have even been asked by the AUKUS partners to be a part of it, and if that request comes, then we’ll have to examine here—and, hopefully, across party political lines—whether we should or not. Now, that’s the open environment that we’ve been operating in the past. Why is the process that Labour started all of a sudden now being painted so foully?

Hon David Parker: Why is the Minister blind to the fact that Kiwis saw this as yet another lurch from this National-led Government while they’re still reeling from other surprises like the reversal of tobacco controls to fund tax cuts, using fast track to override environmental laws by ministerial fiat, and multibillion-dollar tax cuts for landlords?

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: Well, can I just say that I’m not certain who wrote those questions, but it doesn’t sound like the member did.

Hon David Parker: I did. I’m very happy—I wrote them myself.

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: No, that member’s far too clever to make those mistakes. For a start, the first thing we did about the tobacco controls was put the tax up on cigarettes. Was that not noticed last December, or do people just want to run their own convenient argument all the time, followed by so many people up there [Points to the press gallery], who began that in the first place? And the second thing—

Hon David Parker: The member’s in trouble.

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: No, no, no, the member is not in trouble; in fact, he quite enjoys it. I’m going to have to find a new profession—this one’s getting too easy! The truth is that there’s no lurch. We were left with a massive fiscal disaster—borrowing like there’s no tomorrow, like an eight-armed octopus with no restraint—and we’re going to bring this country back to control. We’re going to bring our economy, as some leader has said, back on track, and, as a more profound leader said, take back our country.

Hansard

While answering David Parker’s inane line of questioning about the supposed insult, Winston Peters raised the Australian Financial Review article about Bob Carr entitled “How Bob Carr became China’s pawn”.

Within Australia Carr is now known for speaking up on Beijing’s behalf and talking down criticism of China as a relic of Cold War thinking. There are many possible triggers for this. Examples would be infrastructure purchases, extradition treaties, university issues, political donations, media coverage and allegations of foreign interference, all topics on which Carr has taken to the airwaves or the print media. The pattern is consistent, with Carr denying problems on the Chinese side while simultaneously criticising Australians who see problems, on the other.

There are demonstrable alignments with Beijing’s position. In May 2018 it was reported that Carr had used a Labor colleague in Parliament to put questions about former Fairfax China correspondent John Garnaut to the Senate estimates committee. Garnaut had subsequently worked for Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on China’s influence operations in Australia, and the point of the questions was apparently to compel public servants to place Garnaut’s actions in that role on the public record. Security officials in China had the same interests. They interrogated Chinese-Australian academic Professor Feng Chongyi about Garnaut when they detained him in March 2017.

Earlier he fulminated about “Cold War warriors” and repudiated any suggestion of Beijing’s interference in Australian affairs. These comments echoed those coming out of Beijing. In December 2017, Chinese officials complained of “fabricated news stories” that were “filled with Cold War mentality” and “unscrupulously vilified Chinese students as well as the Chinese community in Australia with racial prejudice”.

AFR

The article goes on to expose that Bob Carr is indeed a “pawn” of the Chinese Government:

The institutional origins of Carr’s China-whatever approach can be found in the history of ACRI. In 2014 a prominent Chinese businessman in Sydney made a significant donation to UTS to establish a new China institute. The same donor subsequently boasted in public that he personally selected Carr to run the operation. Carr emerged as Australia’s most prominent and vocal public advocate for Xi Jinping’s China.

The new institute was not an everyday university research centre but one with a mission to promote an “unabashedly positive and optimistic view of the Australia-China relationship”, in Carr’s words. The mission was consistent with Communist Party chief Xi Jinping’s command to his propaganda cadres to “tell China’s story well”. That initial PR move morphed into a party propaganda triumph in November 2015 when Carr met with Propaganda Bureau deputy director Sun Zhijun in Beijing to discuss co-operation on media coverage. In May the following year, Central Propaganda director Liu Qibao visited Sydney to preside over a signing ceremony at which Carr’s institute contracted with a party-led agency to work on the Propaganda Bureau’s behalf.

China’s official newsagency Xinhua reported that, as a result of this and other Australian media contracts, “myths will be dispelled and cross-cultural understanding is set to grow as China-Australia media co-operation increases”. In China, people know that Xinhua’s mission is to instruct China’s media on the myths that can never be punctured and the news and views that can never be published. That’s its job. Carr was to be a local associate in massaging Australian media reporting on China.

Once these deals were exposed in Australia, Carr’s local credibility as a good China story-teller went into a tailspin. But they did no harm to his standing in China where he is a regular media performer and participant at high-level meetings. In his China appearances, Carr ventures well beyond his institute’s remit on Australia-China relations to offer unabashedly positive and optimistic comments on party history, achievements and leadership. A million people can be placed in detention in Xinjiang, the President of Interpol can disappear, media stars, journalists, and religious pastors can be arrested and jailed on spurious or non-existent grounds without tempting Carr to criticise Beijing in China’s media.

When it comes to criticising the Australian government on Chinese media, Carr turns out to be a real terrier. On August 23, China’s Phoenix TV invited Carr to comment about the downturn in Australia-China relations under the Turnbull government on its nationally broadcast Talk with World Leaders program. After heaping criticism on Turnbull’s approach, Carr told Chinese TV audiences that the turning point in the Australian relations with China came with Trump’s election and inauguration as President of the United States. He neglected to mention earlier incremental shifts in Australia’s position, such as the Abbott government’s outspoken concern over China’s declaration of an Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ) in the East China Sea, which Foreign Minister Wang Yi bluntly characterised in December 2013 as jeopardising mutual trust; or the more outspoken response from Canberra to Beijing’s rejection of the arbitral decision on China’s claims over the South China Sea in 2016, which prompted speculation at the time in China about Australia’s change of tone and what China could do to seek “revenge”. Carr made no mention either of concerns in government, academy and the media about Beijing’s influence operations in Australia, widely canvassed before Trump came to office. No, Carr told China, things turned sour because Canberra was keen to impress Trump.

AFR

It goes on and on, listing chapter and verse about how Bob Carr is a shill for CCP interests. Did Bob Carr sue the AFR? Of course not, because it is all true.

If Bob Carr does indeed sue Winston Peters then he is going to look pretty embarrassed when Winston and his lawyer Brian Henry demolish Bob Carr and outline precisely why Winston Peters has an honestly held belief that Bob Carr is a Chinese puppet.

The bar is too high for Carr though, since he attacked Winston Peters in his speech to the Labour Party. Winston Peters has utilised his qualified privilege and clapped back.

The more stupid parties in this whole kerfuffle will be Helen Clark, Chris Hipkins, David Parker and the Media Party who all leapt on this with gay abandon. They are all going to look particularly shabby by the end of all this.

Cam Slater is a New Zealand-based blogger, best known for his role in Dirty Politics and publishing the Whale Oil Beef Hooked blog, which operated from 2005 until it closed in 2019. Cam blogs regularly on the BFD - where this article was sourced.