Frank Yuan and Joshua Black

Over two consecutive days, independent MP Monique Ryan and Labor’s housing minister Clare O’Neil faced questions about the support of the Hubei Association for their respective campaigns. As was pointed out yesterday, neither campaign ultimately took up the assistance offered by the Association.

The issue came up in during a regular segment featuring Liberal campaign spokesperson Jane Hume and O’Neil herself on the Seven network. Hume remarked to the minister that there “might be Chinese spies handing out” her how-to-vote cards, but the Liberals had “dozens, thousands, hundreds of young people” on the hustings.

The campaign, which appears to have run out of intellectual material, seems to be resorting to a back catalogue of redbaiting and dog-whistling from Cold War electioneering. But the history of fearmongering about foreign interference in Australian elections runs deeper.

Australia’s first “redbaiting” election was in 1925. The Community Party of Australia had just “a few hundred members”, but that didn’t stop the PM, Stanley Melbourne Bruce, from conflating global communist activism with domestic industrial disputes.

Hardly a centenary worth celebrating.

The poisoning of public debate had grim consequences. Bruce’s redbaiting cemented a political culture where it became impossible to question Australia’s defence policy centred around the British imperial presence in Asia. The Labor party had already been branded as disloyal to the country and to the empire thanks to its opposition to conscription during the Great War. Now the conservatives were tying themselves to a declining imperial power, whose defeat in Singapore in 1942 was as predictable as it was tragic – not just for the POWs but for the civilian populations caught up in Japan’s imperial push into Asia.

Despite that deep history, the redbaiting on display in the recent past has been astonishingly inept. At the last election, Scott Morrison repeatedly claimed that the Chinese Communist Party preferred Anthony Albanese. He also described Labor’s deputy Richard Marles as the “Manchurian candidate”.

It wasn’t just Morrison. At the same election, right-wing campaign outfit Advance Australia ran billboards and truck-side ads depicting Chinese president Xi Jinping casting a vote for Labor.

But Jane Hume’s comments represent a new threshold in the cynicism and hollowness of redbaiting in Australia’s elections. Indeed, just minutes later, Hume and O’Neil were singing one another’s “sense of style” and promised to “have a cocktail” with each other after the campaign. Who cares about those Chinese Australians who served as a stand-in target for the politicking?

It is perhaps reassuring that neither candidate seriously believes that those Chinese Australians were spies, but invoking the threat of foreign interference so flippantly does real damage to the social cohesion about which both major parties dissemble. All Australians deserve better than this kind of ritualistic malice.