For many years, there was a large billboard on Dequetteville Terrace in Adelaide, one of the city’s major thoroughfares. It proclaimed that ‘Melbourne may have the Grand Prix, but Adelaide has the Pandas’. It was displayed in the years after the Formula One event was moved from South Australia to Melbourne in 1996, having been conducted in Adelaide for the previous eleven seasons. The billboard was intended obviously for the inhabitants as some kind of salve for losing the Grand Prix. It betrayed the indignant hurt of losing the motorsports event to a larger city.

Don’t get me wrong: I like Adelaide. For more than a decade, our family spent a week in the South Australian capital mainly to follow the Tour Down Under, one of the major cycling events that comprise the World Tour. Even then, there was a concern in South Australia that Melbourne may try to pinch the cycling event, although it could not do as good a job as Adelaide for many reasons.

The billboard came to mind as I observed the visit by Chinese Premier, Li Qiang, to Australia.

His first port of call in Australia was Adelaide in a carefully stage-managed event at which he announced replacements for the two pandas at the Adelaide Zoo. No doubt the venue suited the government politically with Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Trade Minister Don Farrell both from South Australia. But it also suited the Chinese regime which seems to have determined the schedule of events. It suited China’s ‘Panda Diplomacy’ to start Li’s visit with a feel-good announcement. The Chinese exploited South Australian parochialism to the full. The promise at the beginning of the visit by Li Qiang to replace the two pandas set a scene that Mr Albanese appeared afraid to counter. The Chinese Communist party walked all over their timid hosts.

The Chinese played the Albanese government like a fiddle. Both the CCP and the current government have a common foe: the Liberal-National Coalition. The CCP has an intense dislike for the previous government – the Morrison administration in particular – because it had the temerity to challenge Beijing and encourage other nations to do likewise.

The Albanese government is pursuing a narrative that relations with China are being restored, blaming the Coalition for the deterioration. The result is a whitewashing of the real issues of contention. Yes, there were reassuring words about mutual respect, but little of substance. The overall impression was subservience to the CCP. The Prime Minister wouldn’t even confirm the visit, despite dozens of Chinese officials checking the Parliament House venue for the talks. The fact that Don Farrell had to emphasise that the Albanese government was not ‘kowtowing’ to the CCP is indicative of what the majority of Australians now believe.

The audacity – indeed the arrogance – of the CCP delegation was on full display when two of its officials tried to block television footage of the Australian journalist Cheng Lei, who had been detained by the Beijing regime for three years on flimsy charges. The Prime Minister’s repeated response that he was unaware of the incident has worn thin. It is fanciful to believe that his media staff did not alert him. If they didn’t, it was either deliberate or negligent. Either way, it has left the Prime Minister exposed to growing ridicule.

Even Labor’s promise to raise the Chinese military’s unlawful and dangerous maritime incidents was muted. Instead of the appropriate protest, the Prime Minister only said that we need better communications between military forces! Other issues – such as the CCP’s cyber-attacks on our infrastructure – seem to have been neglected by the Australian government in talks with the Chinese Premier. As for the CCP’s egregious abuse of human rights, little was said. Li Qiang must have laughed all the way back to Beijing.

Why is Mr Albanese so timid on foreign affairs? Australia has failed to respond to requests by Ukraine for more assistance in its endeavours to repel Russia, and has been virtually silent on the murderous slaughter by Hamas in the Middle East. A Labor senator who breached a 130-year-old ALP rule about caucus solidarity – a matter for which others have been expelled from the party – was met with the slap of a wet lettuce leaf! Undeterred, she says that she will consider voting against the party again. Finally, she has been suspended.

But it is on China that Albanese’s timidity – if not appeasement – is on full display. It seems that the ‘handsome boy’ would prefer to turn a blind eye to Chinese aggression than criticise the CCP.

Recent events highlight Mr Albanese’s questionable judgment. The feting of Julian Assange by sending the nation’s two most senior ambassadors – Kevin Rudd and Stephen Smith – to accompany him back to Australia and then boasting about being first on the telephone to welcome him suggests his priorities are misplaced.

Many people who supported Assange’s release did so because they didn’t believe he should be imprisoned forever, not that they view him as some freedom-fighting hero.

The events surrounding the Assange release add to the impression that decisions about foreign affairs are being driven by crude domestic politics. Albanese was seeking to outflank the Greens on Assange, just as his government’s muted response to the slaughter of Israelis was driven by electorate politics in Sydney seats with large Muslim populations.

The nonsense that Assange is some protector of media freedoms is undermined by the facts. Has the government done anything to protest the treatment of a genuine defender of press freedom, Jimmy Lai, who is on trial on spurious charges in Hong Kong? It couldn’t even defend the freedom of Cheng Lei from being harassed by CCP officials in Australia’s Parliament House!

Australians want a government that stands up for democracy and clearly rejects the CCP’s aggression. On this score, the Albanese government is failing dismally.