Australia draws line under anti-China hysteria. Will it be enough to unfreeze relations?

This week he reset the Australia-China relationship, ditching 12 months in which Australia had become the most rhetorically adversarial towards China of all of the United States’ allies and partners.

It coincided with a “China panic” in the Australian media, which vastly exaggerated the modest – even meagre – evidence of China elevating its soft power Down Under. Anti-China zealots had portrayed Australia’s 120,000 Chinese students as promoters of Chinese Communist Party ideology. The prime minister’s speech-writer John Garnaut even wrote that “racial chauvinism is only one of the challenges that Beijing is exporting” to universities. The incendiary rhetoric was unsupported by any evidence.

Two examples of Chinese property developers making big donations to political parties were portrayed as a Beijing attempt to buy Australian democracy, overlooking the fact that 300 Chinese companies operating in Australia never gave politicians a cent. To beat up his political opposition last December, Turnbull defended new anti-espionage with a parody of Mao. “The Australian people have stood up”, he told the parliament, reading a speech assumed to be written by Garnaut. It set a new standard in diplomatic clumsiness.