Future Australian parliamentary visits to Taiwan should include government officials or even ministers, Australian Representative Barnaby Joyce said on Thursday after meeting with President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文).
Joyce, a former Australian deputy prime minister and former deputy chair of the Australian National Security Committee, was part of a delegation to Taiwan that also included Australian representatives Libby Coker and Meryl Swanson.
Joyce said he thought “it would be smart” to include government officials or ministers on such sensitive trips.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“When you’re more experienced, you know how to not go off script, but if you have delegations without government officials, they could, dangerously so,” he said.
However, he said that none of the members of his delegation went off script, adding that “you’d be hearing about it, wouldn’t you.”
The visit to Taiwan is the first by an Australian parliamentary delegation in almost three years, but one of many this year by foreign lawmakers, who have sought to show support to the nation in the face of Beijing’s military threats and harassment, economic coercion and cognitive warfare.
“The most important thing is that we’re there,” Joyce said.
Delegations from other countries have usually included news conferences, public events and presidential meetings which are livestreamed or open to the news media, but the Australian lawmakers have done none of this, which is widely understood as a sign that they are treading carefully, as Canberra simultaneously works to repair its relationship with Beijing.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has played down the trip, saying it is simply a resumption of bipartisan trips by lawmakers that were suspended after 2019 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Joyce said there had not been any “direct request” to him from the prime minister’s office or the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to operate with a lower profile.
“I’m a former deputy PM [prime minister] and deputy of the national security committee, so it wasn’t totally silent. That in itself has attracted the ire of mainland China,” he said, in reference to recent Chinese state media denouncements and comments by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The delegation’s four-day trip also included a meeting with Minister of Foreign Affairs Joseph Wu (吳釗燮), who told the Guardian that he understood Canberra was facing a “balancing act.”
However, Wu said the Tsai administration does not “question the support of the Australian government, the Australian parliament and Australian people for Taiwan, especially as Taiwan is already a democracy.”
Joyce said the meeting with Tsai, at which she was given an Australian flag and a belt by Australian brand RM Williams, “went well.”
The meeting focused mainly on trade and Taiwan’s wish to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), as well as renewable and nuclear energy, but they also talked about the stance of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), Joyce said.
“We did touch on the wider ramifications of the mainland-Taiwan arrangement, and they said the problem is that President Xi had turned himself more into an emperor than a president, and is becoming more dynastic than it has been,” Joyce said.
Joyce said Australia’s formal position on Taiwan and China opposed unilateral changes to the “status quo,” and supported the continuation of strategic ambiguity, the US’ long-running position of refusing to confirm whether it would come to Taiwan’s defense if it were attacked by China.
After annual high-level talks in Washington this week, Australia and the US said that they viewed Taiwan as “a leading democracy in the Indo-Pacific region, an important regional economy and a key contributor to critical supply chains.”
Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs Penny Wong (黃英賢) on Wednesday said that Australia had “a strong stake in preserving peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait” and opposed any unilateral changes to the “status quo.”
“We value our long-standing unofficial relationship with Taiwan underpinned by cultural, economic and people-to-people ties,” she said.
Australia and the US also vowed to work for Taiwan’s meaningful participation in international organizations, but Taiwan’s bid to join the CPTPP is far from guaranteed.
Wong last week said that Australia’s present focus was on the UK’s application.
She added that any application would require the consensus of all 11 members of the bloc.
Joyce said he was returning to Australia on Thursday night.
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