China on Thursday said it “strongly deplores” comments by the head of Australia ’s parliamentary intelligence committee, who likened the West’s attitude to China to the inadequate French response to the World War Two advances of Nazi Germany . The Chinese embassy in Australia said in a statement that Australian lawmaker Andrew Hastie had a “cold war mentality and ideological bias”. “It goes against the world trend of peace, cooperation and development,” the embassy said on its website. “It is detrimental to China-Australian relations. “History has proven and will continue to prove that China’s peaceful development is an opportunity, not a threat to the world. We urge certain Australian politicians to take off their ‘coloured lens’ and view China’s development path in an objective and rational way.” Although China and Australia are major trading partners , their relationship has deteriorated in recent years over concerns Beijing is influencing the island’s domestic affairs. Australia has also strengthened its long-standing alliance with the United States, which has accused China of destabilising the Indo-Pacific. Hastie is a federal member of Australia’s Liberal Party, which leads the ruling coalition. He is a conservative lawmaker and former special forces soldier. In an opinion piece in The Sydney Morning Herald on Thursday, he argued the West had wrongly calculated that economic liberalisation in China would lead to democratisation. In World War Two, France had failed to appreciate the “evolution of mobile warfare,” believing its defences would guard again the German advance in 1940, he said. “Like the French, Australia has failed to see how mobile our authoritarian neighbour has become,” he wrote. “The next decade will test our democratic values, our economy, our alliances and our security like no other time in Australian history.” Hong Kong Lennon Wall torn down at Australian university Hastie added that his country had failed to recognise the role of Communist ideology in China’s infrastructure building spree in the Asia-Pacific region, just as Western countries had once failed to understand the motivations of former Soviet Union dictator Joseph Stalin. Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Hastie’s remarks were not the views of the government but added the lawmaker was “entirely entitled to provide his perspective”. “We seek to work closely with [China], in the same way we do everyone in the region,” he told reporters in Townsville. Australia’s dilemma in the Pacific: is China a partner or competitor? The diplomatic flare-up on Thursday coincided with the appointment of Mike Burgess as head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. Burgess previously headed the Australian Signals Directorate, which played a key role in Canberra’s decision to ban China’s Huawei from Australia’s nascent 5G broadband network in 2018. Connect with us on Twitter and Facebook