Canberra’s top foreign affairs bureaucrat accuses China of seeking to stoke ethnic divisions in Australia
- Frances Adamson says Beijing wishes to project an image of Australia as intolerant and discriminatory, urging awareness in how domestic discussions can be portrayed
- While some have welcomed her remarks, others say she is invoking the spectre of China rather than criticising a controversial recent questioning of Chinese-Australians
However, there have been mixed reactions to the comments by Frances Adamson, Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, with some saying she highlighted the political value of not appearing intolerant rather than urging tolerance.
“This is not the way we want to be, or the way we want to be portrayed,” she told a budget estimates hearing in the Australian Senate. “There is no easy answer to this but it’s something we possibly need to consider.”
Adamson said that while information she saw in Chinese state media about Australia did not reflect “what I know to be the reality”, Australians needed to be “conscious” of how they projected themselves.
“The Chinese are increasingly resorting to projecting not only in their own country but potentially elsewhere, images of Australia which do not, to my mind … represent who we are,” she said, adding that Beijing saw the Chinese diaspora overseas as “ultimately being Chinese” and had “certain expectations” of them that were not necessarily shared by Chinese-Australians.
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