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Australia’s political class is waking up to China’s economic warfare — decades too late. The warning signs were there. Why did no one listen?

Nonplussed is as fine a word as you could find to begin a story on the frame of mind of Australia’s governing persons as they regard the mature mercantilism disguised as globalism of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

This was finely illustrated most recently when South Australian Treasurer and Minister for Energy and Mining Tom Koutsantonis expressed exasperation at the activities of China, which, he told ABC News, was using what he called its “taxpayers’” money “to bankrupt” a lead smelter in Port Pirie that is run by Netherlands-based Nyrstar.

Koutsantonis said: “Make no mistake about it, this smelter is under attack. This smelter is having every aspect of its commerciality undermined by a foreign government.”

Nyrstar’s zinc smelter at Glenorchy north of Hobart is also threatened.

Leaving aside the wisdom of depending on a company owned by another foreign entity – albeit as friendly a state as the Netherlands – to be spurred to act beyond making a reasonable and honest profit, let alone respond to issues of national security, the Treasurer is certainly correct to be nonplussed at finding himself – or the segment of the economy for which he is responsible, at least – at the mercy of international extortionists of the calibre of the CCP.

“At every stage of the operations, … the Chinese Government is doing everything it can to build state sovereignty around it,” Koutsantonis said.

Exposed

His next comment, while accurate enough, was nearly comical in its schoolyard expression: “That’s fine for them, but for us, in an emergency, if we needed to be able to defend ourselves and use these critical metals to harden our bullets, harden our bombs, harden our armour in our military applications; and we have to buy all of it entirely from one country … you would leave Australia very, very exposed.”

To echo Koutsantonis, indeed, you would leave Australia very, very exposed. Indeed, we have left Australia very, very exposed.

Not so long ago – July 2025 – Swiss multinational Glencore closed its Mount Isa copper mine; and only a $600 million injection of cash jointly from the Queensland and Federal governments has kept the associated copper smelter at Mount Isa in operation, although realistically, Glencore cannot guarantee keeping it in operation beyond 2028.

In June 2025, John Coyne of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) wrote:

“The copper mine is nearing the end of its life. That’s a commercial reality. But the smelter remains a national asset. Governments aren’t required to underwrite corporate profit, but they do have a responsibility to protect strategic capability.

“… In the era of energy transition and geo-economic competition, the global copper market isn’t free in any meaningful sense. China has already moved to control strategic supply chains.”

Yet, in spite of the shocked incredulity of politicians’ responses to the CCP’s modus operandi, what Coyne says about China and national security have been bumps on the horizon of consciousness for a long time.

Global Power Shift

In 2008, two of News Weekly’s writers and National Civic Council researchers Peter Westmore and Patrick J. Byrne cowrote a long analysis of this very topic, “The Global Power Shift: Defending Australia’s Independence”, which appeared in News Weekly’s stablemate journal, National Observer, No. 78.

The warnings came at a time when most of the West was betting that allowing China membership in the World Trade Organisation would enrich the Chinese people (which it did, patchily) and consequently would encourage the CCP, having shifted towards a capitalist economy, to ease its authoritarianism and even move towards a democratic form of governance (which it emphatically has not done).

“China,” Westmore and Byrne wrote, “with a rapidly expanding, resource-hungry economy, boasting massive domestic savings and huge government-controlled sovereign wealth funds, may find itself in a position to buy out Australia’s biggest strategic industries. Such an economic buyout would pose a serious threat to Australia’s sovereignty.”

They wrote further:

“China’s 21st-century political example to the world is totalitarian rule. It has no ethical framework from which to begin shifting towards democracy. The communist system is built on 2,200 years of centralised, authoritarian rule over China.

“Further, Beijing’s leaders still regard China as ‘the middle kingdom’ between heaven and earth. They intend to build China’s economic and military strength so that it can retake its rightful place as the leading/dominant nation on earth.

“Rapid economic growth is vital for the Communist Party to retain its legitimacy. Hence, rather than helping China move towards democracy, raw, unbridled, capitalist economic growth has helped entrench the communist political system and the drive to restore China to its middle kingdom status. In the process, rather than moving towards democracy, China has supported many of the world’s most odious political regimes, like Burma, Sudan and North Korea.”

Add Iran to that mix of odious regimes, and you have the situation today.

With warnings such as those delivered 18 years ago by Westmore and Byrne, among others, such expressions of shocked unawareness sound, to end on another fine term, disingenuous.

Peter Westmore and Patrick J. Byrne’s piece, “The Global Power Shift: Defending Australia’s Independence”, can be downloaded here.

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Republished with thanks to News Weekly. Image courtesy of Adobe.