Nobody in the current federal government worked harder than Penny Wong to thaw the freeze in Sino-Australian relations caused by Scott Morrison’s curiosity about Covid’s origins. I was initially surprised, then, when Mr Albanese chose not to give her a Beijing guernsey. But I have since learned that this was no diplomatic gaffe. While Ms Wong certainly played an active part in the lifting of PRC embargoes on Australian shiraz and shellfish, President Xi did not personally participate in those discussions, and having never physicallly met Ms Wong, his opinion of her is based entirely on translations of her statements and news photographs and footage. Just as importantly, the only time Xi met Albo in the flesh prior to this trip was at the 2024 G20 summit in Rio, where the Chinese leader only agreed to pose for a selfie with Albo after the latter was described to him not as the Prime Minister of the country which supplies much of China’s coal and steel, nor as a US military ally and Aukus signatory, but simply as ‘a friend of Dan’s’.  It wasn’t until several months later, when President Xi somewhat counter-intuitively dubbed Mr Albanese ‘Handsome boy’, that Canberra alarm bells rang and the PM’s staff realised what had happened: Thanks to Ms Wong’s trademark sensible suits, short hair, more athletic physique and authoritative delivery, for the past three years Xi Jinping has mistaken Australia’s third female Foreign Minister for the man who is our 31st Prime Minister. We must assume that this confusion has now been resolved, and the two men’s relationship will prove as mutually beneficial as the one Gough Whitlam forged with Zhou Enlai in 1973. How Albo will rationalise his blomance with Xi to President Trump – someone he has had even more trouble meeting – is discussed elsewhere in this magazine.

The Australian commodity which China covets most is not, in fact, iron or steel, but another natural resource with which we have been even more abundantly blessed. China squeezes more than 150 of its citizens into each of its 9.6 million square kilometres. Australia, which is considerably larger, has fewer than 3.5 people per square kilometre. Two and a half centuries after being invaded, 70 per cent of it is still uninhabited and half of that is deemed uninhabitable. We have sometimes been short of manpower, often short of rain, and always short of submarines, but we have never been short of space. So I am suspicious of politicians who start sentences with the words, ‘There’s no place in Australia for….’ Not just because, unless they are talking about glaciers or continental shelves, it’s obviously not physically true. But also because it’s downright unconstitutional. Like most decent Australians I’m a fan of free speech. But like many Speccie readers I’m also a free speech absolutist. So while I bow to no one in my abhorrence of, say, antisemitism, I don’t believe the expression of antisemitic views should be criminalised, any more than I believe hatred of Collingwood or tinned beetroot should be criminalised. All Western democracies claim to promote tolerance and diversity, but such claims are increasingly being tested by Orwellian hate-crime legislation. Australia’s physical emptiness makes us uniquely qualified to buck this dangerous trend, and in doing so we could add a new string to our democratic bow. All it would require would be for each state and territory to allocate a few hundred unfarmable, unmineable and culturally insignificant hectares to the expression of offensive beliefs and opinions. Each of these remote enclaves would cater to a different species of bigot, thereby preventing the kind confrontations which have disrupted our city centres in recent years and put our police in the invidious position of having to reveal their own political agendas. Instead of defacing public buildings with ugly graffiti, and bringing traffic to a standstill with unruly marches, visitors to what would become known as safe spaces for hate would be allowed to daub their swastikas unmolested on rock faces which can be seen from nobody else’s window, and chant their slogans in places where they can’t be drowned out by anything but cicadas. As well as allowing ethnically diverse and politically deluded Australians to behave appallingly with impunity, preliminary research suggests that such places would also appeal enormously to tourists from smaller, more crowded countries. And that one day in the not too distant future, Bigotourism may attract as many visitors to Australia as The Great Barrier Reef. At which point the Australian Tourist Authority will be able to amend its current tagline ‘Come and say G’day’ to ‘Come and say whatever you bloody well like.’