Recent events in China have had an extraordinary and revealing effect on Australian domestic politics and invite comparisons with the crises that have lately engulfed the UK and France.

Australia’s “China crisis” was in part triggered by the fact that two former Labor politicians of note (former foreign minister and NSW premier Bob Carr and former Victoria Premier Dan Andrews) attended the recent Victory Day celebrations in Beijing.

Their presence at the festivities should have come as no surprise. China is Australia’s major trading partner and has been for decades. In fact Australia’s current economic prosperity is a consequence of its exceedingly beneficial long-term economic ties with China.

Carr has been a strong advocate for an independent Australian foreign policy and closer ties with China for over a decade, and Andrews negotiated Belt and Road arrangements with China when he was premier of the state of Victoria and has business interests there these days.

Notwithstanding this, the Murdoch media recently described China as an “evil tyranny” and crudely denounced both former Labor politicians as “shameful” for meeting with “Xi Jinping and the world’s nastiest dictators”.

The Australian newspaper – Murdoch’s “quality” broadsheet – published articles titled “Echoes of Adolf: Beijing or Nuremberg as Xi sends grim message”; “To control the future Xi manipulates the past” and “Xi’s China unleashed” – which neatly summarises media coverage of recent events in China.

This, however, is hardly journalism at all. It is one thing to point out the obvious – namely that China is not a liberal democracy. It is quite another to engage in ideologically deranged demonisation of a major world power that Australia, from any rational view, is obliged to maintain good diplomatic and economic relations with.

This modern demonization of China by right-wing media and politicians is, of course, nothing more than a regurgitation of cold war McCarthyist anti-communism and the White-Australia-based racist fear of being overrun by the “yellow peril” in a new guise. Ideological anachronisms live on in Australia like the ghosts of Cold Wars past.

Implicit in this deeply anti-intellectual world-view is a blanket refusal to acknowledge history (including, most relevantly, the brutal Japanese occupation of China in the 1930s and 1940s) as well as China’s contemporary status as a world power – together with its right (long denied by Western and Japanese imperialists) to act as an independent power on the world stage.

The Murdoch demonisers have also forgotten that in 2003 then Liberal Prime........

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