WHY WE NEED A HISTORY LESSON

ANDREW Hastie won’t be shut up. And after China’s outrageous threats over the past week, maybe the Morrison Government should stop trying.

Hastie, the Liberal MP and former SAS captain, has now written a powerful foreword to a book warning that war between the United States and China is ominously likely, if not yet inevitable. Destined for War: Can America and China escape Thucydides’

Trap?, republished by Scribe next week, is by eminent Harvard scholar Graham Allison, who says that in the past 500 years we’ve 16 times seen what we see now — an established superpower challenged by a rising new one. In 12 of those 16 times, war broke out.

Hastie, now chairman of parliament’s intelligence and security committee, says Australians will “get little comfort” from this.

Nor does he want us to. He goes back even further in history in his foreword, to the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta.

“We, as Australians, … will find more in common with the people of Melos than with the Spartans or Athenians,” he says.

Melos, an island nation, refused in 416BC to side with mighty Athens, saying it was not right.

Hastie notes the Athenians’ brutal response: “Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.’”

Melos was crushed. Its men were slaughtered and women made slaves.

“The questions of geopolitics are not simply academic,” says Hastie, who has fought in battle. “They also warn of grave danger and unimaginable suffering for those who fail to heed the unchanging realities of history.”

Hastie will know his analogy, however ancient, is likely to upset the Morrison Government as much as it will China’s. But how much longer must he stay silent?

The government has effectively kept him muzzled for two months, after he warned of China’s rising threat and our sloppy thinking.

He’d written that we’d wrongly assumed the Chinese dictatorship would become more democratic as it got richer, just as the French had wrongly assumed their Maginot line of forts would save them from Nazi invasion.

Mentioning the Nazis — very appropriately — got Hastie mocked by journalists. China’s embassy, typically, turned to bluster and threats, accusing Hastie of a “Cold War mentality” that was “detrimental to ChineseAustralian relations”.

Even some of Hastie’s senior colleagues attacked him. Finance Minister Mathias Cormann called his comments “inappropriate” and Attorney-General Christian Porter accused him of “oversimplification”.

Hastie disappeared from public debates on the urgent security issues that he fears Australians dismiss too lightly.

Three things have since happened that should make his critics think twice.

First, the Chinese embassy did something unusual just before last Tuesday’s 70th anniversary of China’s dictatorship: it offered journalists interviews with a guest it had flown out.

This was the belligerent Professor Wang Yiwei, who warned Australia not to side with the US: “If there is a war, whether a hot war or cold war, you are the first sacrifice for this war.”

Hastie in his foreword notes this “ominous” threat. Most other MPs pretended not to notice.

Next, China backed up this threat in its massive parade in Beijing last Tuesday, showing off a vast array of weapons, including new hypersonic nuclear-tipped rockets capable of reaching the US in half an hour.

And, third, we were reminded just how weak we’ve become in the face of this growing belligerence, when Victoria’s police celebrated this anniversary of the dictatorship by running China’s communist flag over the Box Hill police station.

Three of our politicians even cut a birthday cake at the nearby Box Hill Town Hall in honour of this regime that has banned democracy, banned free speech, locked up a million Uighurs for “re-education”, imprisoned an Australian pro-democracy writer on fake charges of spying and urged Chinese to revere its massmurdering founder, Mao Zedong.

Two of those three MPs were clueless state members, Labor’s Paul Hamer and the Liberals’ Neil Angus.

The third was federal Liberal Gladys Liu, who still hasn’t explained why she was a member of three groups linked to the propaganda arm of the Chinese regime, and why mainland Chinese donors gave her so much money for the Liberals.

Remember: when Hastie warned about China’s influence, the government put him in the sin bin. When Liu’s links to the dictatorship were revealed, the Prime Minister sat in solidarity beside her in parliament.

But it’s Hastie who must be supported and Liu disowned. Our freedom is on the line.