Avoid blame game with China on coronavirus probe, say Australian former foreign ministers

Former top diplomats Julie Bishop and Gareth Evans say Australia’s public push for a legal inquiry into the Covid-19 pandemic is likely to fail

Instead, the country should be employing ‘quiet diplomacy’

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Australia’s former foreign minister Julie Bishop has called for ‘quiet diplomacy’ with China regarding an inquiry into the coronavirus. Photo: Reuters

Published: 9:30pm, 12 May 2020Updated: 10:18pm, 12 May 2020

China should be encouraged to join a scientific study into the origins of the coronavirus through quiet diplomacy as Australia’s public push for a legal inquiry is likely to fail, two Australian ex-foreign ministers said on Tuesday.

Julie Bishop, Australia’s top diplomat between 2013 and 2018, said Canberra should persuade Beijing to join an “exercise in lessons learned”, amid rising tensions over an Australian proposal for an inquiry into the pandemic that has resulted in more than 285,000 deaths and crippled economies worldwide.

“My expectation is that as things stand China will not cooperate with an exercise that is seen as an investigation into China’s handling of the pandemic,” Bishop said during an event hosted by the Lowy Institute, a Sydney-based think tank.

“In the absence of that the only other way to get China to cooperate so that we actually have access to Chinese information is through quiet diplomacy and persuasion.”

Julie Bishop, pictured in 2018 when she was Australia’s foreign minister, with Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi. Photo: Xinhua

Bishop, who served under former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, said Australia should work with countries that had handled the pandemic well such as South Korea and New Zealand to push for an examination of the origins and spread of the virus, which was first detected in Wuhan, China.