“We could take over New Zealand. It’s still in our Constitution.”
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has joked that his country could simply “take over New Zealand”, pointing to New Zealand’s unusual place in Australia’s founding document.
“We could take over New Zealand. It’s still in our Constitution. We can just do it. Sorry,” Albanese said, laughing during a July appearance on comedian Nikki Osborne’s Bush Deep podcast.
The takeover remarks were shortened in the podcast’s final edit, according to the Daily Mail, but Osborne later recalled Albanese saying he could take over New Zealand “tomorrow if I wanted”.
“No one cared,” she said, because attention instead centred on Albanese’s comments about Australian singer Kylie Minogue.
There is a sliver of constitutional truth behind the joke. New Zealand is named in covering clause 6 of the Australian Constitution among the colonies that could form part of the Commonwealth.
Australia’s Parliamentary Education Office describes the clause as giving New Zealand the option to join Australia as a state.
New Zealand considered federation but declined to join in 1901. A Royal Commission concluded that the country “should not sacrifice her independence as a separate colony”, according to a New Zealand Parliament research paper.
Albanese therefore cannot simply “take over” New Zealand. The Constitution preserves an invitation for New Zealand to join Australia, not a power for Canberra to annex it.
PRIMER MINISTRO AUSTRALIANO, ALBANESE BROMEA CON QUE AUSTRALIA PODRÍA «APODERARSE» DE NUEVA ZELANDA
«Podríamos apoderarnos de Nueva Zelanda. Todavía figura en nuestra Constitución».
El primer ministro de Australia, Anthony Albanese, bromeó diciendo que su país podría simplemente «apoderarse de Nueva Zelanda», haciendo referencia a la peculiar mención de Nueva Zelanda en el documento fundacional de Australia.
«Podríamos apoderarnos de Nueva Zelanda. Todavía figura en nuestra Constitución. Simplemente podemos hacerlo. Lo siento», dijo Albanese entre risas durante una aparición en julio en el podcast *Bush Deep*, de la comediante Nikki Osborne.
Según el *Daily Mail*, los comentarios sobre la toma de control se recortaron en la edición final del pódcast, pero Osborne recordó más tarde que Albanese afirmó que podría apoderarse de Nueva Zelanda «mañana mismo, si quisiera».
«A nadie le importó», comentó ella, ya que la atención se centró en cambio en los comentarios de Albanese sobre la cantante australiana Kylie Minogue.
Existe cierto fundamento constitucional tras la broma. Nueva Zelanda aparece mencionada en la cláusula preliminar número 6 de la Constitución australiana, entre las colonias que podían formar parte de la Mancomunidad (Commonwealth).
Fuente: https://centrist.nz/albanese-jokes-australia-could-take-over-new-zealand-1786792313521
MAO ZEDONG, ISRAEL AND THE ROAD NO TAKEN-50 YEARS AFTER LEADER’S DEATH
Israel was the first Middle Eastern country to recognize Mao Zedong’s Communist China, and briefly came close to establishing full diplomatic relations.
Wednesday, September 9, marked 50 years since the death of Mao Zedong, the Chinese revolutionary leader whose long shadow is still cast over Asian and world geopolitics.
For almost three decades after proclaiming the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in Beijing in October 1949, Mao stood at the center of a political transformation that altered China entirely and reshaped the balance of the Cold War.
Under his leadership, the world’s most populous country emerged from decades of civil war, foreign occupation and internal collapse as a Communist power determined to chart its own course, eventually challenging both the United States and, after the Sino-Soviet split, the Soviet Union for influence across Asia, Africa and the developing world.
His domestic rule brought immense upheaval and suffering, from the Great Leap Forward to the violence and political convulsions of the Cultural Revolution, which together inflicted enormous loss of life and upheaval on China. But abroad, Mao became something larger than the leader of China alone. To revolutionary movements from Vietnam to Africa and the Middle East, Maoism offered an ideology built around guerrilla warfare, peasant revolution and resistance to imperialism, while Beijing sought to present itself as the natural patron of peoples struggling against colonial or Western-backed powers.
Israel occupied a curious place within that worldview, because Mao’s China had not begun as its enemy.
A relationship with an extraordinary trajectory
In fact, the relationship followed an extraordinary trajectory. Israel was the first country in the Middle East to recognize the new Communist government, and the two countries briefly appeared to be moving toward full diplomatic relations, as Chinese officials spoke warmly of friendship with Israel and the Jewish people. Within little more than a decade, however, Mao was receiving the leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Beijing, supplying Palestinian terrorists and describing Israel alongside Taiwan as one of the West’s “bases of imperialism in Asia.”
A little over a month before Mao died in Beijing, then-Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin attempted a relatively uncomplicated gesture of international sympathy.
On July 28, 1976, an enormous earthquake had devastated the Chinese city of Tangshan, killing hundreds of thousands of people in one of the deadliest natural disasters of the 20th century. Rabin sent Chinese premier Hua Guofeng a cable expressing Israel’s sorrow over the loss of life and offering medical and other assistance to the Chinese people. Beijing sent it back.
Attached to the returned message was an explanation that, since the People’s Republic of China did not have diplomatic relations with Israel, the Chinese government could not accept the cable.
For a brief moment in the 1950’s, full diplomatic relations appeared within reach
It was a final footnote to the relationship that a quarter of a century earlier had appeared capable of ending very differently. Israel had been the first country in the Middle East to recognize the People’s Republic, Israeli officials traveled through Maoist China as guests of the government, and senior Chinese officials had spoken openly of their friendship with Israel and the Jewish people. For a brief period during the 1950s, full diplomatic relations appeared within reach.
Mao, born in Hunan province in 1893, had risen from the son of a prosperous peasant farmer to become one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party and, eventually, the dominant figure of the Chinese revolution. After decades of civil war, Japanese occupation, the Long March, and the final defeat of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, Mao stood in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on October 1, 1949, and proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China.
On January 9, 1950, less than four months after Mao declared the People’s Republic, Israel formally recognized his government as the legitimate government of China. At the time, there was some Chinese sympathy for Zionism, which could be viewed through the lens of revolution and a national liberation movement that had fought British imperial rule.
The Korean War, which broke out later that year and eventually saw Chinese troops fighting American-led UN forces, complicated Israel’s efforts to develop the relationship. Israel was increasingly conscious of its close relationship with the United States, which continued to recognize Chiang Kai-shek’s government on Taiwan as the legitimate government of China and viewed diplomatic engagement with Communist Beijing with deep suspicion.
Even so, the possibility never entirely disappeared, and several years later an unlikely Israeli diplomat in Burma began trying to reopen the door.
David Hacohen, Israel’s man in Rangoon, had become convinced that the young Jewish state could not afford to neglect Asia. Beginning in late 1953, he held discussions with China’s ambassador to Burma, Yao Zhongming, and later met premier and foreign minister Zhou Enlai as the Chinese leader passed through Rangoon following the 1954 Geneva Conference.
The talks quickly became serious enough for trade to be discussed, and produced one of the stranger episodes in the story. According to Hacohen’s account, the Soviet ambassador in Burma joined the conversations and, confronted by the possibility that Washington might object to direct trade between Israel and Communist China, suggested simply sending the goods on a triangular route through Odesa and Siberia.
Beijing subsequently invited an Israeli commercial delegation to China, and in early 1955 Hacohen led a group that spent several weeks touring the country, visiting cities, factories, industrial plants and villages before holding talks in Beijing.
The reception appears to have been extraordinarily warm. A Chinese undersecretary of trade told the delegation that “the Chinese people and their government are great friends of Israel and the Jewish people,” while Hacohen returned convinced that China wanted commercial ties and would respond positively if Israel moved toward diplomatic relations.
There were discussions behind the scenes about what formal relations might look like, yet Israel hesitated. Hacohen later complained of what he called “friendly American pressure,” while Israeli diplomats in Washington worried that moving too quickly toward Mao could damage the country’s increasingly important relationship with the United States.
By the time of the Bandung Conference in April, 1955, China was moving in another direction.
Bringing together 29 Asian and African states in Indonesia, Bandung became a defining moment in the emergence of what would later be called the Third World. Israel was kept away following opposition from Arab participants, while Zhou used the gathering to cultivate governments emerging from colonial rule and to align China increasingly with their causes.
Another blow to Sino-Israeli relations was Israel’s participation alongside Britain and France in the 1956 Suez Crisis against Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt, which proved particularly damaging in Beijing, where Mao’s China was attempting to present itself as one of the foremost opponents of Western imperialism. Whatever the Chinese had once made of Israel’s own struggle against British rule, the image was now of Israeli forces fighting beside two former European imperial powers against perhaps the most celebrated Arab nationalist leader of his generation.
During the following decade, that perception only hardened.
PLO greeted warmly by China’s leadership
The transformation was unmistakable in March 1965 when Ahmad Shukeiri, then chairman of the recently established PLO, arrived in Beijing at the head of a Palestinian delegation. He was given the sort of welcome usually reserved for the representatives of a state, greeted amid flags, drums and crowds before meetings with China’s most senior leadership, including Mao himself.
During his conversation with Shukeiri, Mao offered perhaps the clearest explanation of where Israel had come to sit in his conception of the world.
“Israel and Formosa (Taiwan) are bases of imperialism in Asia,” Mao said. By then, he had come to see Israel and Taiwan in much the same light: as Western-backed footholds in Asia, Israel positioned against the Arab world and Taiwan against Communist China.
Taiwan was among the defining obsessions of Mao’s foreign policy. Chiang Kai-shek and the remnants of the Nationalist government had fled there following their defeat in 1949, surviving under American protection as Mao remained determined that the island would eventually come under Beijing’s control.
China provided PLO with arms, money, military training
China’s support for the Palestinians soon extended well beyond rhetoric. The Chinese provided money, small arms, expertise and military training to Palestinian organizations, although the scale was considerably smaller than was sometimes claimed at the time. Small groups of Palestinian terrorists traveled to China during the late 1960s, where their instruction included guerrilla warfare alongside immersion in Maoist political doctrine and visits to factories, agricultural communes and revolutionary sites.
Some returned to the Middle East as instructors themselves, carrying with them an ideology then reaching the height of its global influence. Even Mao’s Little Red Book found its way onto the battlefield; following an Israeli operation against Palestinian guerrillas in Lebanon in 1972, Israeli troops were reported to have found an Arabic edition of Mao’s sayings among captured propaganda material.
Even during the years of Maoist hostility, however, Israel maintained the position it had taken in 1950 – that Beijing, rather than Taipei, was the government of China.
In October 1971, despite China’s support for Palestinian terror groups and years of bitter rhetoric against Zionism, Israel voted in favor of UN General Assembly Resolution 2758, which transferred China’s seat at the United Nations to the People’s Republic and expelled the representatives of Chiang Kai-shek. Israel was among the 76 countries voting in favor.
Five years later came the Tangshan earthquake and Rabin’s returned message.
Mao died several weeks afterward, on September 9, 1976. In the years that followed, China gradually moved away from the revolutionary foreign policy of the Mao era, as Deng Xiaoping placed more emphasis on economic modernization and pragmatic relations abroad. Quiet contacts with Israel developed behind the scenes, and on January 24, 1992, the two countries finally established full diplomatic relations.
MAO ZEDONDG, ISRAEL Y EL CAMINO NO TOMADO: 50 AÑOS DESPUÉS DE LA MUERTE DEL LÍDER
Israel fue el primer país de Oriente Medio en reconocer a la China comunista de Mao Zedong y estuvo cerca, por un breve periodo, de establecer relaciones diplomáticas plenas.
El miércoles 9 de septiembre se cumplieron 50 años de la muerte de Mao Zedong, el líder revolucionario chino cuya prolongada sombra sigue proyectándose sobre la geopolítica asiática y mundial.
Durante casi tres décadas tras la proclamación de la República Popular China en Pekín en octubre de 1949, Mao fue el eje de una transformación política que cambió a China por completo y reconfiguró el equilibrio de la Guerra Fría.
Bajo su liderazgo, el país más poblado del mundo emergió de décadas de guerra civil, ocupación extranjera y colapso interno convertido en una potencia comunista decidida a trazar su propio rumbo; llegó a disputar la influencia en Asia, África y el mundo en desarrollo tanto a Estados Unidos como —tras la ruptura sino-soviética— a la Unión Soviética.
Fuente: https://www.jpost.com/history/article-908268
DFA: CHINA ISLAND-BUILDING NO EFFECT ON PANGANIBAN, ZAMORA REEF’S STATUS
The Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) on Friday said China’s island-building on Panganiban Reef (Mischief Reef) and Zamora Reef (Subi Reef) cannot change their status as low-tide elevations and demanded an end to Beijing’s occupation and activities there.
DFA spokesperson for maritime affairs Rogelio Villanueva said Panganiban Reef and Zamora Reef are low-tide elevations within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone and continental shelf, in accordance with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos) and the 2016 Arbitral Award.
“As low-tide elevations, the Philippines exercises sovereign rights and jurisdiction over the features, and these can neither be the subject of a sovereignty claim nor capable of appropriation under international law,” the foreign affairs department said in a statement.
The DFA said China’s island-building on both features violates the Philippine Maritime Zones Act, or Republic Act No. 12064, and Unclos, as confirmed by the 2016 arbitral ruling.
The construction of artificial islands also does not alter the legal status of the two features as low-tide elevations, the department said.
The statement came a day after the Philippine Coast Guard reported that Chinese forces fired flares at a Philippine aircraft conducting a routine surveillance flight over the West Philippine Sea.
According to the PCG, the aircraft was challenged by Chinese forces at Zamora Reef before flares were fired toward it. Chinese forces at Panganiban Reef also fired flares at the aircraft.
The two reefs are among the features in the Spratly Islands occupied and developed by China. Beijing has built artificial islands and military facilities on both features.
Beijing claims almost the entire South China Sea, including areas within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone.
An international arbitral tribunal in 2016, however, ruled that there was no legal basis for China to claim historic rights to resources in areas beyond the maritime zones provided for under Unclos.
The DFA called on China to “cease its illegal occupation and activities” in Panganiban and Zamora reefs immediately and abide by the final and binding 2016 Arbitral Award.
“The Department will continue to assert the Philippines’ sovereignty, sovereign rights and jurisdiction in the West Philippine Sea, and champion the Philippines’ legitimate rights and interests in the maritime domain,” the DFA said.
FILIPINAS-CHINA: LA CONSTRUCCIÓN DE ISLAS POR PARTE DE BEIJING NO ALTERA EL ESTATUS DE LOS ARRECIFES PANGANIBAN Y ZAMORA
El Departamento de Asuntos Exteriores (DFA) declaró que la construcción de islas realizada por China en los arrecifes Panganiban (Mischief Reef) y Zamora (Subi Reef) no modifica su condición de elevaciones en bajamar, y exigió el cese de la ocupación y las actividades de Pekín en dichas zonas.
Rogelio Villanueva, portavoz del DFA para asuntos marítimos, afirmó que los arrecifes Panganiban y Zamora son elevaciones en bajamar situadas dentro de la zona económica exclusiva y la plataforma continental de Filipinas, de conformidad con la Convención de las Naciones Unidas sobre el Derecho del Mar (CONVEMAR) y el laudo arbitral de 2016.
«Al tratarse de elevaciones en bajamar, Filipinas ejerce derechos soberanos y jurisdicción sobre estas formaciones; por tanto, no pueden ser objeto de reclamaciones de soberanía ni susceptibles de apropiación bajo el derecho internacional», señaló el departamento en un comunicado.
El DFA indicó que la construcción de islas por parte de China en ambos arrecifes infringe la Ley de Zonas Marítimas de Filipinas (Ley de la República n.º 12064) y la CONVEMAR, tal como confirmó el laudo arbitral de 2016.
Published twice per week by Nuevo Poder. Articles and op-eds focusing on geopolitical issues around Indo-Pacific area
Editor: LW, senior fellow of REDCAEM and CESCOS
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