The Senate Estimates of Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Legislation Committee is happening today, and the tough-talkers are putting their toughness on display. Coalition senators — Michaelia Cash and Jacinta Price — repeatedly says “Chinese Communist Party” whenever they refer to the Chinese government. It is a well-established practice in American and Australian politics, especially by those who portray China as a menacing totalitarian state.

Of course, the Chinese state is highly integrated with the Communist Party. But the very same politicians who say “Chinese Communist Party” as an epithet would count other one-party states as Australia’s most important friends. 

Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party has been in power for 64 of the last 70 years, and its symbiotic relationship with the administrative bureaucracy is well known. Singapore’s ruling party, the People’s Action Party, has been in power since Singapore’s independence in 1965 without interruption, and holds nearly 90% of the seats in Singapore’s parliament.

Would Senator Cash and her colleagues call the US government the “Republican Party”? There is certainly a strong case for it if they apply the same logic. The Republican Party controls all three branches of the US federal government – including an increasingly political Supreme Court, which gave the US president immunity in carrying out (vaguely defined) official responsibility. The Republican administration in the White House is increasingly using armed forces domestically, against the American public. And the American system already expects top officials in government agencies to be political appointees.

When Canberra’s tough-talkers refer to the Chinese government as the “Chinese Communist Party”, they are trying to present themselves as being clear-eyed about the “real” China, and present China as a uniquely exotic and dangerous entity. By implication, China is an existential threat to Australia – perhaps the existential threat.

Very few of China’s close neighbours share that view: even Southeast Asian countries, with whom China has territorial disputes, have been maintaining good trade relations and regular diplomatic exchanges with China. To them, the “hard-nosed” alarmism about China only shows that some in Australia are simply not serious about doing foreign policy in a complicated real world.