AUSTRALIA’S deputy prime minister said the national government has consistently opposed Chinese ownership of the Port of Darwin and isn’t under added pressure from the Trump administration to find a new buyer for the facility that is under increased scrutiny in Canberra.
“We don’t think it is appropriate that that piece of infrastructure was in the hands of a Chinese publicly-owned entity, a Chinese government-controlled entity,” Richard Marles, also Australia’s defense minister, said Saturday in an interview with Bloomberg Television on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore. “We are working through to get a better resolution to the ownership structure of the port.”
Ahead of an election earlier this month, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese promised to return to Australian control the Port of Darwin from Chinese company Landbridge Group. It was awarded a 99-year lease in 2015 by the Northern Territory government in a move that sparked criticism from an array of politicians in Australia and in the US, which uses a nearby military training facility.
China is Australia’s biggest trading partner by far and previously expressed anger over pressure from the Trump administration concerning the Panama Canal, which resulted in a potential sale by a Hong Kong-based conglomerate of its two Panama port operations — a deal Beijing has said it will review.
“We’ve been concerned about that ownership from the moment that we came to government,” Marles said of the Darwin facility on the country’s northern coast.
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth did urge Australia to increase its military spending “in a very respectful and dignified way” in a meeting on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue, Marles said in a separate interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corp.
Asked whether the US remains a trusted partner, Marles reaffirmed the ties while playing up its partnerships with other countries. “We work very, very closely with the US and continue to do so and do so under the Trump administration,” he said. “We very much build relationships beyond the US.”
Marles also criticized Beijing for its military buildup.
“China is engaging in the biggest conventional military buildup that the world has seen since the end of the Second World War, and that’s happening without a strategic transparency or strategic reassurance,” he said. “It’s really in that context that we are increasing our defense capability in a historic way.”
But in his speech Saturday at the Shangri-La Dialogue, Marles also warned against carving up the Indo-Pacific into spheres of influence.
“Dividing the Indo-Pacific into geo-strategic and geo-economic blocks would not only make us all poorer, it would make us more vulnerable to conflict,” he said. “Trade as been the lifeblood of the Asian region.”
Relations between Australia and China have dramatically improved in the three years since the election of Albanese’s government in May 2022, including the lifting of trade curbs imposed by Beijing at the height of tensions during the Covid-19 pandemic.
However, recent developments have tested that stabilization, including when China’s navy conducting live-fire exercises off Australia’s heavily populated east coast in February.
China’s Ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian, warned Canberra in a statement to tread carefully in its decision making around the Port of Darwin lease, saying Landbridge had made “significant investments” in the facility. –BLOOMBERG
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