Shadow Minister for Defence Industry Jacinta Nampijinpa Price after the Liberals party room meeting for a leadership ballot at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, on May 13, 2025. AAP Image/Mick Tsikas
Australia’s Shadow Defence Industry Minister Jacinta Price is advocating for more Australian businesses to produce weapons locally and for training civilians with crisis-time skills in response to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s “hostile activities.”
Price expressed concern about the lack of public discourse on the dangers posed by the CCP’s military aggression in the Asia-Pacific region and its foreign interference in Australia.
“If a threat is disregarded, downplayed, or left undiscussed by parliamentarians, Australians are unlikely to appreciate the threat and even less likely to support necessary policy responses,” she said.
“That’s why, as a shadow minister in the defence portfolio, I will regularly and directly call out the hostile activities of the CCP,” she wrote in an Aug. 23 commentary in The Australian.
CCP’s Aggression Concern
While China is a major trading partner, Price cautioned that Australians cannot ignore the communist regime’s “military adventurism, coercion, and aggression.”
She listed several recent examples, including the CCP’s illegal militarisation of islands in the South China Sea, blocking the Philippines coastguard, intrusion of Japan’s airspace, the navy’s unnotified live-fire exercise off Australia’s coast, and CCP leader Xi Jinping’s vow to “reunify” Taiwan, a self-ruling democracy Beijing views as a breakaway province, by “all necessary means.”
Price also referred to the CCP’s imposition of trade barriers and bans on Australian goods, in retaliation for former Morrison government’s call for an independent investigation into the origins of COVID-19.
“[Prime Minister] Anthony Albanese may yet find out—as other world leaders have—that carrots can quickly turn into sticks,” she said.
“Pointing out that the CCP is causing tensions across our region is neither ‘beating the drums of war’ nor ‘fearmongering.’ Rather, it’s a fact we must face as a nation to stir us into action to help preserve peace in the region and to deter aggression.”
