Former Liberal member for Chisholm Gladys Liu (Image: AAP/James Ross)

Things are getting heated in the battle for Chisholm. 

At a candidates forum last night, Liberal MP Gladys Liu’s opening was interrupted by a peak student politics-level protest. Max Mok, a Hong Kong independence activist, and Drew Pavlou, an anti-Chinese Communist Party Senate candidate, stormed the event at Melbourne’s Mount Waverley Community Centre yelling: “Gladys Liu is taking money from the Chinese government.” They then scattered a bunch of yuan notes across the floor.

Chisholm, in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, is the Liberal Party’s second most marginal electorate, and a seat Labor’s Carina Garland is desperate to win. With a high Chinese-Australian population it could be a key test for how the Morrison government’s “tough on Beijing” rhetoric plays in a large but diverse diaspora population.

It’s also a test for Liu, the first Chinese-background woman elected to the House of Representatives. Since her narrow win in 2019 she has courted controversy. First it was having allegedly misleading Chinese-language corflutes. (The Federal Court cleared her.) Then the foreign influence stories started, allegations of links to CCP-aligned United Front organisations, and that a key Liberal donor she was linked to had engaged in acts of foreign interference for Beijing.

Those stories formed the basis for Labor attack ads, which were slammed by Prime Minister Scott Morrison as “sewer tactics”. 

But the debate around China has so frequently been in the sewer.

Morrison calls Deputy Labor leader Richard Marles a “Manchurian candidate”. In an increasingly tense political climate, Chinese-Australians were challenged to pledge allegiance and condemn the CCP at a Senate hearing. Anti-Asian racism has risen during the pandemic, as the Morrison government’s rhetoric on China hardened.

It’s unsurprising those issues surfaced during last night’s forum. Liu said she’d faced racist abuse following Labor’s ads. Garland pointed to the “destructive and divisive” comments on China from Morrison and Defence Minister Peter Dutton over the last term. 

As senior Coalition figures huffed and puffed about the China threat since the dramatic deterioration in 2020, Liu has remained largely silent. Last night she claimed Labor was flip-flopping on national security, and Garland fell back on the opposition line of accusing the Liberals of trying to foment division on an issue which both parties agree on.

And Liu contradicted herself on the WeChat issue. In January she announced she was boycotting the Chinese social networking platform after Morrison’s account was taken over. 

When asked whether she wanted the Chinese-Australian community to stop using the platform, she said she’d never boycotted it over foreign interference concerns but simply wanted more efficient ways of talking with constituents. Her January media release says otherwise.

WeChat has been useful for Liu. In 2016 she used it to mobilise conservative Chinese voters and help win Chisholm for Julia Banks. In 2019 her supporters used it to spread anti-Labor misinformation. This time they’re doing the same, although Liu denies any involvement.

Chisholm might be a regular marginal seat, where voters are concerned about the usual issues around economic security and cost of living. But as last night’s debate showed, the increasingly toxic debate on China and the controversy around Liu have made it about a whole lot more — a microcosm for the tensions within the Chinese diaspora, and a litmus test for how broader geopolitical shifts could play out at a local level.