Sharri Markson has written a quite impactful story based on this speech from Marles, published in The Australian today.

Mr Marles, Labor’s defence spokesman at the time, made the unscripted remarks, at odds with party policy, in a Q&A session following a speech at Oxford University in October 2017.

In a video recording of the previous unpublished remarks obtained by The Australian, Mr Marles praised China’s human rights contribution and described it as a “force for good”.

“You can make an argument that it’s as big a contribution to human rights in terms of the alleviation of poverty that comes from it that we have seen in our lifetimes,” he said.

Mr Marles claimed that while Australia and China “have different political systems, China is, on balance, unquestionably a force for good”.

He also spoke about the “really significant contribution that China is making to humanity, which as I described, is the single biggest alleviation of poverty in human history”.

“In every speech I make in mentioning China, I always mention that. Not everyone does,” he said.

In the speech before his Q&A session, Mr Marles said a starting point to forging a friendship between Australia and China “is to acknowledge China’s considerable humanitarian achievements”.

Mr Marles argued that the rise of China “needn’t be worrying, necessarily”.

“China is not the Soviet Union. It does not seek to export an ideology, to supplant our political system and replace it with their own,” he said.

“While Australia may lie within a region China sees as being its domain, there is no fear that China would ever imagine forcing upon us an abandoning of our liberal democracy.”

At the time Mr Marles made these comments, ASIO had for two years warned political parties about foreign interference and foreign donations from figures linked to the Chinese Communist Party seeking to interfere in our democracy.

EXTRACT ENDS

There's plenty more in Sharri's story at The Australian.