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How China Got Sri Lanka to Cough Up a Port (Published 2018)
A Times investigation into Sri Lanka’s handover of its Hambantota Port starkly illustrates how China turned an ally’s struggles to its strategic advantage.www.nytimes.com
Labor signing up to sell Victoria the Chinese. The link above shows how Sri Lanka built a massive port where no ships go resulting in the port plus 10,000 acres being handed over to the Chinese.
As the article states, Sri Lanka was hungry for financing. Victoria, on the other hand, has a triple A credit rating. With lending being very cheap right now there is no good reason to make ourselves incumbent on a foreign state government for raising capital.
It's another example of Victoria being out of step with the rest of Australia. Victoria is the only state to go against the advice from our national security agencies
and make such a deal with China. All of Australia’s policy, analysis and intelligence agencies, see the BRI as a Beijing play for geo-strategic influence and power. The Federal government refused to sign a BRI. Canberra understood the initiative has a deep strategic objective – to render those drawn into it economically dependent and supine in the face of the Communist Party’s overseas ambitions.
We've seen the Chinese Communist Party’s infiltration of the NSW branch of the Labor Party. It's clear that the Victorian branch is heavily influenced by the CCP. Look out for Daniel Andrews and Tim Pallas, after retiring from politics, taking up highly paid roles with Chinese lobby or investment groups.
Like Andrew Robb, the Liberal government minister who pushed through a free trade agreement between China and Australia before leaving parliament to take up consultancies with Chinese companies with a reported annual income of $800,000.
Or former Labor premier John Brumby. He is chair of the Australia-China Business Council that promotes a 'positive and optimistic' view of China. Brumby is also on the board of Huawei, the telecom giant judged too close to China’s intelligence services to be trusted with Australia’s 5G network.