COMMUNIST-owned land should be confiscated if Beijing refuses to pay reparations for the “astronomical” economic damage its Wuhan virus has unleashed on Australia.
The chairman of Australia’s powerful Parliamentary Trade & Investment Committee, Mr George Christensen, has suggested land held by China’s communist corporations be returned to Australia.
“The Chinese should be made to pay reparations – I don’t think they will, but maybe we can take back some of the foreign-owned [land] their corporations hold, as damages,” the National Party MP said last week.
“Either it’s negligence or it’s something worse,” he said.
“The University of Southampton has put out a report saying that if they acted three weeks earlier, if China acted three weeks earlier 95 per cent of the Coronavirus cases wouldn’t be here today.
COVER UP
“They were negligent, they were trying to cover it up, they were trying to silence doctors.
“There was a report that was out on the internet that was suddenly pulled off all the official sites that was by the South China University of Technology that suggested that this virus emanated from a laboratory.
“People are trying to poo-poo that idea but it was the university in China that said it from the get-go. What did they do? We don’t know. It needs to be investigated.
Mr Christensen was responding to an article appearing in The Spectator Australia magazine by former federal government adviser Mr Terry Barnes.
REGIME
“Xi’s authoritarian government, all the way from the local party satraps in Wuhan to the president himself wasted crucial time when the spread of the virus could have been shut down at the source,” Mr Barnes wrote on March 28.
“The regime covered up the Wuhan virus emerging and taking hold.
“In Australia alone, confronting the Wuhan virus has meant a $3 billion clinical response, and $200 billion, so far, in economic stimulus to keep businesses going. Britain is putting an extra £30 billion into its National Health Service alone.
“The cost of enforcing shutdowns and lockouts across the world will be astronomical. And these are just direct costs, not the dire economic catastrophe unfolding as whole industries crash, jobs are lost, share markets plummet and daily life is upended.”
REPARATIONS
Mr Barnes said leaders should respond as the world faces Wuhan virus-induced recession or worse, and people die in their thousands.
“Why shouldn’t Mr Morrison, President Trump and other world leaders calculate the damage the Chinese regime’s negligence has wrought, and send Comrade Xi the most gigantic reparations bill in the history of mankind? He deserves it and his discredited, despotic government should be made to pay it.”PC
Definitely deserves a thorough investigation because, if even only partly true, it is a scandal of global proportions.
Good thinking, 99!
I think this is an excellent idea, because:
(a) The Chinese are an easy-going race; they aren’t hung up with such concepts as “face”.
(b) The Chinese are not at all rapacious; they care almost nothing for the riches of this world, so it wouldn’t upset them at all.
(c) The Chinese are neither economically strong nor a country on whom we depend for trade, so there is not the slightest danger that they could destroy us financially.
(d) The Chinese are militarily weak, so they could not crush us in a war. They do not have nuclear weapons, they not have control of vital strategic high ground such as the South China Sea, and they have shown themselves to be neither opportunistic nor hegemonistic.
(e) The fact that such a suggestion has been made in public by a member of the House of Representatives is certain to engender the undying respect of the Chinese Communist Party, if not their unqualified affection.
(f) There is an instructive historical precedent whereby Germany was forced to pay punitive reparations after the First World War, and even the most casual student of history knows how well that turned out.
So I’m glad to know that our country is in the safe hands of such thoughtful and erudite politicians as Mr Christensen. He is obviously possessed of unimpeachable conservative credentials, and is nothing if not a clear-eyed visionary – a true standard-bearer who is a shining beacon of hope in these most discombobulating of times. I could fairly weep with pride at the abundance of riches this fortunate country has when it comes to choosing those who will govern – and to think that these colossi ask nothing more than that they be paid a few hundred thousand dollars a year and not be held accountable for anything they say or do!