At last the corruption of Senator Dastyari by the Chinese communists has awakened Australia to what I have been warning about for a long time – our sleepwalking into a global threat from a growing power which has no respect for democratic institutions, International law, a free press, its neighbours rights, business norms, or even its own citizens.

Just this week I was reading of the state of fear that citizens experienced under the reign of King Henry VIII of England, where it was never known whose head would be next on the block, however innocent, at the whim of an unstable absolute monarch.

Many thought if they stepped back when one of their innocent friends was taken to the Tower for execution, and kept quiet, they would be spared, but their cowardice came back to bite them, and they felt the axe themselves anyway.

That’s why Australia should join the US in testing the freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, instead of hoping China will stop at what it has taken so far. Beijing, under President Xi Jinping, has become a much darker power, full of imperial assurance as nations back down before it, and the West has been prepared to ignore its bullying of smaller regional Sates to protect  its commercial trade with its best customer.

Worse still, we have remained quiet about China’s human rights abuses, which could come back to bite Australians in particular, as China gets used to throwing its weight around in the East, and casts its eye upon our resources.

A chilling development has been reported by a New York university political science professor, Ian Bremmer. China has begun to use technology to track the ‘trustworthiness’ of its 1.4 billion citizens. It tracks their personal finance details and social media to watch for anyone critical of government policy. It tracks consumer habits, which websites are accessed, social connections, drinking habits and related convictions, even parking fines. China’s State Council proudly claims that this technology, called a ‘social credit system’, will ‘allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.’ Talk about George Orwells ‘1984’ !

Can we in Australia remain relaxed in the face of such behaviour and abuse of individual Chinese citizens? Australia should speak out in favour of human rights everywhere, even if it costs us financially, or risk seeing China’s domination of our region, for we have seen it is prepared to use force to obtain its goals, with no consideration of the rights of others.

Let us hope that the realisation that China is no benign power has sunk in and that our government is prepared to stand up for freedom everywhere. Troublous times lie ahead worldwide before the world’s armies, gathered to attack Jerusalem, are totally defeated by Jesus Christ at Armageddon, including some 200 million from the East! Revelation 16:16, , ‘And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon.’  …….and  9:16, ‘And the number of mounted troops was two hundred million; I heard their number.’