The rejection of the Liberal Party by Chinese Australian communities in the election was comprehensive and unambiguous.

The Liberals not only failed to wrest back those marginal seats with large numbers of Chinese Australian voters, which they had lost to Labor last time, but they have also helped turn some safe Liberal seats marginal. Further, there were much bigger swings against the Liberals than the national average in many seats.

There is a wide range of reasons — economic, social, and cultural — why Australians voted against the Liberals. Chinese Australians, while sharing these concerns, seemed to have voted primarily to defend their political interests. In other words, against the geopolitical backdrop featuring tensions between the US and China as well as the reality of having the US as a strategic ally and China as its biggest trading partner, most Chinese Australians decided to vote for a party that is less likely to encourage Sinophobia and warmongering.

Based on opinions expressed on WeChat and views that have emerged in conversations with members and leaders of various Chinese communities, it is possible to identify at least 10 moments leading up to the election that cumulatively pushed Chinese-Australian communities towards their final rejection of the Liberal Party. Below is a list of these moments in chronological order.

Prior to this election

Although Scott Morrison was not running in this election, the spectre of his political legacy lingers. The worsening of the Australia-China relationship and the creation of AUKUS continue to be a source of Chinese-Australians’ unhappiness with the Liberal Party. Labor inherited AUKUS and now has fully owned it. Despite the fact that most Chinese Australians voted Labor this time, it would be a mistake to assume that they also support AUKUS.

May 2022

Upon its loss in the 2022 election, a defeated Liberal Party chose its Defence Minister Peter Dutton to lead the party. The Liberal Party’s internal review found that the party had a China problem, so Dutton tried to mend his ways with Chinese-Australian voters. But at the end of the day, he never gained their trust. In fact, Dutton’s leadership fuelled the chances of some Liberal candidates. Scott Yung, despite John Howard’s endorsement, ended up losing, even though he had at one stage tried to distance himself from Dutton. Keith Wolahan’s loss is another case in point. Many people in his constituency in Menzies said that even though they believed Wolahan was a decent man and may have been a good MP, they knew that a vote for him would be a vote for Dutton.

Late February, 2025

The arrival of three Chinese warships conducting live-fire exercises in international waters close to Australia gave the Coalition an opportunity for political point-scoring. Dutton accused Anthony Albanese of being “weak” and unsure about who had been warned about the Chinese drills, and when. Dutton’s remarks caught some people in the Chinese-Australian communities by surprise, as, until then, he had been trying hard to cultivate a more friendly image to Chinese Australians.

1 April 2025

Before the controversy surrounding the Chinese naval ships properly died down, another Chinese vessel, conducting joint research with New Zealand scientists, was reported outside Australia’s exclusive economic zone. This gave Dutton another opportunity to have a go at his “weak” opponent. He attacked the prime minister’s response, while alleging that the vessel was gathering intelligence and mapping the paths of Australia’s undersea cables. Increasingly, Chinese-Australian voters felt that they started to see Dutton as he really was, and was no longer pretending to “make nice”.

20 April 2025

While many people among the general public remember the disgraced Mike Pezzullo for this misconduct, he is mostly known to most Chinese Australians as a warmonger who declared that he heard the “ drums of war”. As some may remember, the former public servant is a long-term staunch national security hawk who wants the US-Australia alliance to “go on a war footing”. Dutton’s indication that he may bring Pezzullo back from his political wilderness was seen as a nod to the right, and had raised concerns in the Chinese communities.

22 April 2025

Pauline Hanson’s 1996 maiden speech with her infamous one-liner “I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians” has stuck in the minds of many Asian Australians. So, it is easy to imagine the horror and disbelief when they heard the news about the Coalition’s preference deal with Hanson. On the day when the news broke, one could almost hear the sound of some Chinese-Australian voters reshuffling their deck of cards in working out their voting preferences.

23 April 2025

Shadow Defence Minister Andrew Hastie had made comments in the Parliament on Labor’s “weak” defence policy, which, according to him, was risking letting China and Russia “eat us for lunch”. In a joint statement with Dutton, Hastie announced that the Coalition pledged $21 billion in increased defence spending over the next five years, with further increases over the following five years to bring Australia in line with the Trump administration’s expectation of America’s allies spending 3% of GDP on defence. This joint statement does not mention China at all, but most Australians, and certainly Chinese Australians, knew that China was the elephant in the room. Conservative media told its readers this spending put Australia on a “war footing”. While this was seen as a desirable outcome for the audience of the conservative media, such war talk remains a source of anxiety for Chinese Australians.

28 April 2025

Nine Entertainment journalist Paul Sakkal published an article “Group with historical CCP links ‘required’ Chinese Australians to vote for Ryan” in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. The story insinuated that Ji Jianmin, president of the Hubei Association — the organisation that has been accused of working with a Chinese Communist Party agency — could be trying to influence the Australian election. The story served as a reminder of the bad old days where accusations about Chinese agents of influence were made on a regular, but flimsy, basis.

29 April 2025

Shadow Minister for Home Affairs James Paterson was not only dubbed the Liberal Party’s “campaign attack dog”, he has also been the attack dog on Labor’s foreign policy in the last three years. While his boss Dutton had to lie low for a while in order to endear himself to  Chinese Australians, Paterson appeared to have been more free to speak his mind. In addition to The Age story, the _Nightly’_s story entitled “China red alert for teal MP on volunteers” offered Paterson yet more fresh ammunition. Addressing journalists, Paterson expressed “serious concerns” and posted the Nightly article prominently on his official website. While neither Paterson’s rhetoric nor The Age/Sydney Morning Herald’s stock narrative about Chinese influence was new, this episode did send a timely warning to Chinese Australians: should the Liberals regain power, they certainly could expect to see more of this complicity between the media and hawkish politicians.

30 April 2025

The grand finale in the Liberals’ drama of alienating Chinese Australians was delivered by Liberal Senator Jane Hume, who went on Sunrise to debate Minister for Housing Clare O’Neil. Hume, with a contemptuous smirk, said that among those handing out leaflets for O’Neil there “might be Chinese spies”. Ironically, Hume is one of the two authors of the Liberal’s 2022 internal review, which points to, wait for this, “a particular need for the party’s representatives to be sensitive to the genuine concerns of the Chinese community and to ensure language used cannot be misinterpreted as insensitive”.

The “spy” bomb caused an instant explosive response within Chinese-Australian communities. Within a couple of hours, Hume changed from a relatively unknown politician to a household name that people loved to hate. Given the extensive track record of her colleagues such as Paterson and Hastie in terms of their hawkish public rhetoric, it is surprising that, overnight, Hume topped the chart of unpopularity as far as Chinese-Australian voters were concerned. Their anger and indignation with Hume felt almost visceral, and certainly palpable to anyone who spent time on Chinese social media such as WeChat. An open letter has since been published demanding that she apologise; a petition on change.org has been started condemning her egregious allegation. And despite the Coalition’s election loss, anger over Hume’s remark continues to percolate.

The message from Chinese-Australian communities is unmistakeable: while never voting as a single block, Chinese Australians, increasingly aware of themselves as a significant political force, will not hesitate to vote against a party that could harm their political interests. They do not want to support a party that does not listen to them, that is more inclined to use national security as a domestic political football and that is prone to perceive Chinese Australians as agents of Chinese influence, rather than as rights-bearing citizens.