Australian PM right on China, wrong on Labor. By Greg Sheridan.

The Morrison government has been extremely strong in standing up to Beijing. However, some things it says about the Labor Party are simply not true. Scott Morrison was completely out of line to call deputy Labor leader Richard Marles “a Manchurian candidate”. To the Prime Minister’s credit, he instantly withdrew the remark. …

Overall, the Albanese opposition, like the Bill Shorten opposition before it, has stood with the government in support of the US alliance, and against Beijing’s increasingly aggressive posturing. …

So what parts of the Morrison charge against Labor have some substance?

First, the Chinese Communist Party certainly wants Morrison to lose. He has been one of the most outspoken and determined leaders in the world in resisting Beijing’s coercion. He has also been diplomatically important in bringing to birth new groupings that Beijing profoundly dislikes, namely AUKUS and the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue.

Logically, if Beijing wants Morrison to lose, they want Albanese to win. But that is a million miles from saying Albanese is Beijing’s candidate. The circumstance overall reflects no discredit on Albanese at all.

The second ground where Morrison has a real point is that Labor has a terrible record on national security. Before the 2007 election Labor promised a strong defence force but then cut defence spending to the lowest proportion of GDP since 1938. That is not a speculation or a slur, that is fact. …

Finally, Labor does contain a significant body of opinion that supports the increasingly deranged, defeatist, pro-Beijing views of Paul Keating. Beijing’s “useful idiots” in the West no longer argue that Chinese communism is really soft and cuddly but just misunderstood. They argue the far more sinister line that China is so powerful that resistance is futile, especially for countries like Australia.