Morrison, Frydenberg say Labor’s ad targeting Gladys Liu is racist

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has chastised Labor for an advertisement highlighting Liberal MP Gladys Liu’s links to donors suspected to be risks to Australia’s national security, claiming the opposition is engaging in racist campaigning.

“They go after Gladys Liu because she’s Chinese,” Morrison said on Sunday. “They’re engaged in what I think is a sewer tactic here.”

The Sunday Age revealed a new online ad targeting the Hong Kong-born MP’s record, including her involvement in a campaign against the LGBTQ Safe Schools program and her campaign’s use of controversial signage that appeared to mimic the Australian Electoral Commission.

One component of the ad stated that the Victorian division of the Liberal Party reportedly handed back $300,000 in donations because then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s office was told the Chinese donors, invited to a 2015 event by Liu, were potential national security threats.

“What do we know about Liberal Gladys Liu?” a male voice says in the ad, with an ominous-sounding background track.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg told reporters in Melbourne on Sunday that Liu, who holds the ultra-marginal eastern suburbs seat of Chisholm, was a “proud Australian citizen” and admonished the “desperate, dishonest, racist attack ad by the Labor Party” without specifically outlining why he believed it was inappropriate to reference Liu’s links to the donations.

“The Labor Party here is … engaging in scare tactics, and in a racist attack ad on the first Chinese-born person to sit in the House of Representatives,” he said.

Morrison and Liu visit Wallies Lollies in the seat of Chisholm this month.Credit:James Blackwood

“Gladys Liu is a very effective local member. I’ve been out campaigning with her twice over the course of this campaign. She is a proud Australian citizen. And this racist attack ad by the Labor Party has no place in our community.”

But Penny Wong, Labor’s foreign affairs spokeswoman and who is from a Chinese-Malaysian background, said the ad raised legitimate questions. “There were a number of these issues raised a few years ago in parliament and I remember my then [Coalition] counterpart … accusing me and others of attacking [Liu] because of her ethnic heritage, which is not the case,” she said.

“I think there were questions that she should have answered then and it is legitimate for those to be answered.”

Foreign policy and national security have emerged as a fault line during the election campaign. The opposition has attacked the Coalition for failing to use diplomatic pressure to stop Solomon Islands signing a pact with China that could allow the superpower to establish a military base close to Australia, calling it the “worst failure of Australian foreign policy in the Pacific” in almost 80 years.

Last week The Age spoke to dozens of voters in Chisholm, where a quarter of voters are from Chinese-speaking households, and found divergent opinions on whether the Morrison government’s tough stance on China, spawned by an increasingly assertive Chinese government, was turning voters of Chinese background away from the Coalition.

On Saturday, Liu said in a statement: “I am a proud Australian citizen and won’t be distracted from my mission of delivering for the residents of a Chisholm by a desperate and dishonest campaign by Labor.”

Cut through the noise of the federal election campaign with news, views and expert analysis from Jacqueline Maley. Sign up to our Australia Votes 2022 newsletter here.

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