A kiss on the hand may be quite continental/And Mr Wang’s my new best friend… 

Well, it certainly looked like that, thought many, when Chinese diplomat Wang Xining met ABC 7.30 journalist Laura Tingle at the National Press Club last week in Canberra. 

That was the occasion when Wang warned Australia to ‘correct mistakes’ an address conveniently not reported in full by Your ABC but it should have been, because the CCP is playing the old game of threaten, threaten, until resistance is lowered and the game is up.  

And how better to ensure that that threatening posture is reported than to find an amenable carrier of the message – like a blonde white woman who nightly fronts the camera and reports the news, from an ABC perspective?  

This is not, of course, to envisage that La Tingle would accede to Chinese blandishments; her father, John Tingle, a popular radioman, was after all, one of the founders of the now-flourishing political party, Shooters, Fishers and Farmers.  

One would hope, that with that pedigree, Laura would not sell out her nation’s values quite as easily as Wang might hope and wish. But then, it all depends on events, doesn’t it ?  

Your correspondent once interviewed an elderly Frenchwoman, her hands now crippled with arthritis, but hands that had once held a handgun and poured petrol into wine bottles stuffed with rags, Molotov cocktails, to be lobbed into incoming German tanks.  

“The ladies of the bourgeoisie were worst, running after German officers like bitches in heat,”  she said, pouring coffee and going on to remark that she had learned to like the taste of coffee made with chicory, but there was no comparison with real arabica.  

How would Australia fare if we were placed in the same position that Taiwan, the Philippines, Hong Kong and eventually, probably all of southeast Asia may face, in a standoff with China?   

Would Our ABC accede to having tame, compliant broadcasters brought in to make us like what was happening above our heads? (Broadcasting in Occupied France was so pro-Axis that the banned BBC news was listened to with increasing fervour by every patriotic French man and woman.)  

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has finally shown some spirit and torn up the Victoria’s Belt and Road Initiative that was drawn up in the secrecy of Dan Andrews’ office, without prior consultation with the federal government, the States and Territories and, most importantly, since we purport to be a democracy, the Australian people. No State government has the legal power to make international treaties (since this, in effect, is what BRI is) – that is for what we have a Department and Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade.  

Yet diplomats like Wang Xining will keep trying, keep threatening, keep coercing, politicians, journalists, ‘influencers’ in all walks of life, to come around to his government’s way of thinking.  

It may have started with a kiss on the hand.  It will not end there if the CCP has its way in Australia.  Just ask Hong Kong.