LATIKA M BOURKE: MPs sound alarm over Australia’s dangerous reliance on China

A trio of Australian MPs attending an international gathering calling on their governments to take a tougher line on Chinese dominance have called for a national stocktake on our dependencies on China and raised fears about over-reliance on EVs.

Labor Senator Deborah O’Neill and the Labor Member for the federal Victorian seat of Holt Cassandra Fernando, as well as the federal Liberal Member for McPherson, attended the annual conference of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China.

Speaking exclusively to The Nightly on the sidelines of the conference in The Hague in the Netherlands, Mr Rebollo, Senator O’Neill and Ms Holt laid down their political arms to draw attention to Australia’s over-reliance on Chinese goods.

In a joint interview, Mr Rebello said Australia needed to face up to its dependencies on China sooner rather than later.

“To face the fact that we need to have these discussions about the role of China in our region and the role that Australian is going to play in the Indo-Pacific region more broadly, going forward, in managing the current stability in the area going forward,” he said.

“I don’t think we’ve had the conversation at the level that we need to have it. There are people in government who would be having those conversations. There’ll be people in political circles and think tanks. But we’re not having those conversations as part of our day-to-day discussions, and they should be.”

He said Australia had not properly accepted and learnt the lessons of the COVID pandemic, when essential supplies from China were restricted and the CCP imposed tariffs on Australian producers as payback for the Coalition’s foreign policy.

“You would have thought that the response from government, whichever persuasion of government, should be after COVID – ok let’s do a stocktake. What are the key things that we need in this country?

“We can’t manufacture a smartphone in this country. The key medicines that people rely on in our country, we’re not able to manufacture those.

“So if we’re not having some sort of a strategy, which I’m not aware as a member of parliament, that we actually have or that there are discussions about that says we’re going to do a stocktake that is critical in our country, then we’re not having the conversations that we need to be having.”

He said it was ultimately the job of the government of the day and should be part of Australia’s overall defence strategy.

“Because if we’re not able to secure for the Australian people the goods and services that they depend on and rely on, especially where there’s a link to defence, that is a serious vulnerability; it’s up to the government of the day.”

Senator O’Neill said that in October, Australians for the first time bought more Chinese electric vehicles than Japanese ones.

“One of the things that we’re constantly hearing is that there are listening devices in cars that there’s surveillance of our particular environment and information sharing to another country, so these are the arguments that are being put to us by people who are watching this industry, that there is sovereign risk in having such a presence of foreign information gathering capacity embedded in cars,” Senator O’Neill said.

Dutch MP Jan Paternotte told the conference that his intelligence services had told him to stop using his Chinese-made robotic vacuum cleaner as its autonomous sensors could be used to listen to his private conversations.

“If China is in vacuum cleaners, where else is it?” he said.

This week, China passed a $1 trillion trade surplus with the rest of the world for the second year in a row, except in 2026, it achieved this dominance within the first ten months of the year.

IPAC gathers MPs from parties across the political spectrum from 46 countries around the world. It was formed during the COVID pandemic, and one of its earliest campaigns was to urge international support for Australia’s wine industry following the Chinese Communist Party’s economic coercion on the industry over the former Coalition government’s call for an inquiry into the origins of the virus which killed millions and caused economic shutdowns.

The MPs voted to launch an international campaign on the global importance of securing peace and stability in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait.

Xi Jinping has said he wants to be ready to take over democratically ruled Taiwan from next year. Former Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd and China scholar has warned that the Chinese President could exploit Donald Trump’s final year in office to make his move.

The MPs also voted for the IPAC to champion a global strategy for highlighting a “whole of society” approach to economic resilience.

The motions can lead to real outcomes. For example, in 2026, the IPAC resolved to push back on the CCP’s distortion of the UN Resolution 2758. The CCP claims this resolution affirms a “One China Policy” in relation to Taiwan. But after the IPAC decision, the Australian Senate became the first parliament to pass a motion supporting Taiwan. Several other parliaments, including Canada and the UK followed Australia’s lead.