Manufacturing the enemy: the election fear and paranoia circus act

The real threat to Australia’s sovereignty isn’t a small Chinese vessel on our doorstep, it’s the political culture that treats paranoia as policy and outrage as a strategy.

It’s only been the early stages of the federal election campaign, but the Coalition has already reached for one of its oldest and most divisive tools: China. Lacking substantive policy ideas or credible achievements to highlight, the opposition has once again dipped into that vast pool of nationalist paranoia, this time targeting a Chinese research vessel that legally passed through international waters.

The ship, part of a joint scientific project with New Zealand, was navigating between Victoria and Tasmania – a voyage through lawful maritime zones. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese initially sought a measured tone, acknowledging the ship’s presence and confirming it was under surveillance by the Australian Defence Force. Then came the unnecessary concession that he “wished it wasn’t there at all,” a vague statement that gave the leader of the opposition, Peter Dutton, the opportunity to whip up a frenzy, yet again.

Dutton wastes no time when it comes to these opportunities to race bait and so it turned out to be in this case. Abandoning the facts in favour of base racism, he accused the prime minister of having “lost control” of national security, and claimed – without any evidence – that the vessel was gathering intelligence and mapping undersea cables critical to Australia’s communications. This innocuous research ship, in Dutton’s imagination, became a Chinese spy ship, an invisible threat hovering off the coast. The media followed suit – of course – amplifying the panic with sensationalist speculation about sabotage and espionage.

At the Prime Minister’s media conference, journalists aggressive questions reflected this media-fuelled hysteria: What is the ship researching? What has been done to protect our undersea infrastructure? Has anything been communicated to the Chinese government? Albanese did maintain a cautious line amid all of this paranoia, reaffirming Australia’s commitment to monitoring foreign vessels and respecting international law. But by then, the narrative had already shifted. In the public domain, the ship had been transformed from a benign research vessel into a symbol of Chinese aggression – not due to facts, but to political opportunism – and that the entire 27 million people of Australia, and the massive 33,000 kilometres of coastline were somehow going to be breached and seriously under threat.

This episode speaks volumes about Australian politics and very little about China’s actual behaviour, as well as showing how a complex issue can be reduced to a simple fear campaign. The truth – that it was a joint mission with one of our closest allies – barely made a mention in any of the media coverage. Perhaps Albanese could have clearly stated that China is Australia’s largest trading partner and is a good friend to this country, instead of saying he wished the ship “wasn’t there at all”. This may have diffused the hysteria somewhat, but the reality is, Dutton would have found a way to escalate this issue regardless.

Dutton’s goal is simple: to dominate the media cycle after a poor start to the election campaign and reassert the Liberal Party’s supposed strength on national security – despite a history marked by foreign policy blunders, underfunded cyber defences, and international embarrassment. This is the same Coalition that leased the Port of Darwin to a Chinese company – Landbridge Group – yet now casts itself as the guardian of Australian sovereignty. Their record on immigration and border security is riddled with many inconsistencies and contradictions, yet the perception persists – thanks mainly to the reinforcement and support provided by the mainstream media.

And so, the national conversation during an election campaign has been hijacked by an invented crisis. Instead of discussing real issues – climate, healthcare, housing, the cost of living – we’re fixated on a small research ship in international waters. Why? Because fear of China is an easy distraction, as it always has been throughout Australia’s history, the race card the Coalition plays so well, and the media never hesitates to endorse.

The red scare and anti-China hysteria rears its ugly head again

There’s something disturbingly familiar about the way Australia erupts into panic whenever China appears in domestic political debates. It takes very little: a research ship with Mandarin signage on its bow, a shipping log, a blurry photo, or a vague military report. Once triggered, the machinery of hysteria springs into action – politicians manufacture outrage, and the media amplifies it with alarmist speculation. The result is rarely rooted in fact, but in cultural anxiety, residual racism, and an enduring Cold War mentality.

The Coalition has perfected this playbook. It has used it time and again – against asylum seekers, against Huawei, Chinese universities, international students, the Belt and Road Initiative, and now, against a modest research vessel scanning the ocean floors providing important scientific research on crustacea and other sea creatures, in conjunction with a trusted partner in New Zealand. And the plot never changes: China is infiltrating, China is spying, China is coming for us. The yellow peril! The red peril! China is always in the wrong, Australia is always right. Each rewrite of this story adjusts the volume and the visuals, but the message stays the same.

This engineered xenophobia isn’t accidental; it’s strategic. By portraying China as a looming threat, Dutton can distract from economic issues and his own political performances. And the media, complicit in this game, obliges with headlines, maps, and dire hypotheticals.

Rarely does the media challenge this narrative. China is not treated as a complex nation of 1.4 billion people with a multifaceted relationship with Australia. Instead, it becomes a caricature for everything the political class wishes to externalise: fear, uncertainty, and the unknown. The other. Somehow, China is both our largest trading partner and our gravest national threat. This contradiction is never resolved because it doesn’t have to be: fear will always work.

And this is a contradiction deeply embedded in Australia’s identity. From the “yellow peril” hysteria of the 19th century to the communist Asian invasion myths of the 20th century, fear of China has long been part of the national psyche. Today’s media cycle just gives it new packaging – a rebranding for an old prejudice.

But the consequences are real. This political theatre undermines Australia’s international reputation, it alienates Chinese–Australian communities, and reduces complex global issues to empty slogans. It trivialises legitimate concerns – such as China’s human rights record – by folding them into cheap domestic point-scoring. It also reveals a nation pretending to be a Pacific leader while behaving like a regional backwater bathing in its own racist ineptitude.

Certainly, China’s authoritarianism deserves criticism, there’s no question about this. Its record on civil liberties, its aggressive diplomacy, and its treatment of minorities should concern us and the international community. But reacting with hysteria instead of diplomacy only weakens Australia’s credibility. We don’t need to choose between appeasement and paranoia: we just need to grow up.

If Australia wants to act like a middle power, it needs to stop behaving like a fearful outpost, a baby country in the style of a mini-me United States. Calm, mature leadership is not weakness. Trade is not betrayal. And diplomacy requires more than slogans shouted from within the Canberra bubble.

The hypocrisy at the heart of the Port of Darwin lease

Nothing better illustrates the performative nature of Australia’s national security politics than the saga of the Port of Darwin. In 2015, during the time the Coalition was in office, the Northern Territory’s Country Liberal Party government leased the port to China’s Landbridge Group – a deal proposed by the territory government, approved at the federal level and quietly welcomed by Coalition insiders.

It was a 99-year lease at a price of just $506 million (or a bargain price of $5 million per year), with no serious scrutiny or strategic foresight. Even worse, former Liberal Party Trade Minister Andrew Robb took an $800,000 consulting role with Landbridge immediately after leaving Parliament – and possibly before his exit – a clear conflict of interest that stank so severely of impropriety. At the time, there was minimal media outrage. No national security alarm bells.

Ten years later in 2025, the Port of Darwin has become a political football, with both major parties pledging to unwind the lease in the name of national sovereignty. The Coalition, eager to rewrite history, has conveniently erased its role in the deal, positioning itself as the defender of Australian interests. The media, once again, always helps out in this narrative sleight of hand.

Labor, instead of challenging this revisionism, has followed suit – framing its own reversal as a bipartisan act of national interest. But there’s no acknowledgement of the systemic failures that allowed the lease in the first place: a decade of shortsightedness, transactional politics, and elite self-enrichment.

The port has become a stage prop in a broader election narrative – used to project strength, distract from economic stagnation, and reinforce anti-China sentiment. Yet there has been no evidence of any security breach or strategic failure arising from the lease and, from all accounts, Landbridge has proved to be good operator of the port. The optics, not the facts, are driving the calls to reclaim the port. And Landbridge holds all the cards: if there is to be a ‘just compensation’ under the terms of the contract, the company will receive far more than the $506 million it agreed to pay in 2015.

It’s so typical of Australian governments: a poor deal on gas in 2005 means that we now buy our own gas back from markets in China, Japan and South Korea at an inflated consumer price, a ridiculous situation created by the Howard government but continued by Labor governments, and this will continue until at least 2032. Iron ore is sold to overseas interests at a low price, and most of the profits going to mining magnates such as Gina Rinehart, Andrew Forrest or multinational entities, with little in royalties returned to the Commonwealth of Australia. Governments have agreed to this.

And now, a likely large compensation package to a Chinese-owned company to lease back the Port of Darwin. To use the parlance of Kerry Packer when he sold the Nine Network to Alan Bond at an inflated price of $1 billion in 1987, only to buy it back several years later at a quarter of the sale price, the Chinese government would be thinking: You only get one Australian government in your lifetime, and we’ve had ours.

This is the core contradiction at the heart of Australia’s China policy. China is only a threat when politically convenient. When donations flow, jobs are created, or marginal seats are in play, China becomes a valued partner. But when an election nears, the same relationships are rebranded as national security threats. It’s the classic behaviour of a racist nation: we’re all mates when you do as you’re told and behave in the way we expect you to behave.

Reclaiming the Port of Darwin could well be the right decision in the national interest. It did seem peculiar for the government at the time to be leasing the port to any foreign interests but also in the way that it produced such a bad financial deal for the Northern Territory government. But it won’t undo the damage of a political culture that sold out national infrastructure for short-term gain – and now expects applause for pretending to fix it.

Because the real threat to sovereignty isn’t China. It’s the political class that undermined it in the first place, and now hopes that no one remembers what they did.