Australia needs “the most productive relationship” with China, Defence Minister Richard Marles has said, striking a cooperative tone a day after his first face-to-face meeting with his Chinese counterpart.
Speaking from a security summit in Singapore on Sunday, Mr Marles signalled that the Albanese government was making further efforts to stabilise its relationship with China, despite increasing friction between the two countries.
“The substantive issue that we wanted to pursue with the Chinese, having raised a range of issues with them, was to see the progress of our defence dialogue continue” Mr Marles said from the Shangri-La Dialogue, an annual gathering of security and defence officials hosted by the London-based think tank the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
“That’s so that we can have the deepest understanding of each other’s behaviours.”
The appearance followed a 45-minute meeting between Mr Marles and Chinese Defence Minister Admiral Dong Jun, who was appointed to the role in December.
Describing the meeting as a “very frank conversation”, Mr Marles said he had directly raised the “unsafe and unprofessional” tactics employed by the People’s Liberation Army against the Australian navy – the first time the issue had been raised at a ministerial level.
In November, Australian navy divers were injured after sonar pulses deployed by a Chinese warship. Earlier this year, personnel on-board an Australian navy helicopter were put in harm’s way when a Chinese jet detonated flares nearby, however no one was injured in the incident.
“Obviously, we have seen some unsafe incidents – incidents which were both unsafe and unprofessional … I obviously raised them with Minister Jun,” Mr Marles said.
Previously, China has disputed Australia’s characterisations of the incidents, and blamed Australia for causing the disputes.
Rejecting Coalition criticism that Labor should have contacted the Chinese leadership earlier, Mr Marles said “there was no phone when the Liberals were in power”.
“They had absolutely no ability to communicate with China at all about anything, even in respect of giving a difficult message,” he said.
“The fact that we have a relationship now not only allows us to co-operate, but it does allow us to be able to say difficult things in a respectful way.”
The pair reaffirmed to hold direct lines of communication between their two militaries open, part of a broader effort to preserve a recent rapprochement between Australia and China.
“Having a dialogue of that kind in place, allows us to have a much better understanding of what we’re doing and creates much greater safety for the men and women who wear a uniform,” Mr Marles said.
“One of the things that we need to be doing in our relationship with China, … is to be speaking with clarity and to make sure that we are disagreeing when we must.”
In a further sign of cooling tensions between Canberra and Beijing, Chinese Premier Li Qiang will visit Australia in a fortnight’s time.