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Australian political parties woo Chinese-Australian voters CANBERRA, Australia — The Chinese diaspora in Australia, long regarded as a politically apathetic ethnic minority, are being wooed like never before by political parties who see them as key to winning crucial seats that could decide a general election next week. China has become one of Australia’s largest sources of immigrants. Both Prime Minister Scott Morrison and opposition leader Bill Shorten have opened WeChat accounts to reach large Chinese populations in big cities with political messages. The opposition centre-left Labor Party has cried foul over some of that engagement, complaining to WeChat’s owner Tencent that China’s largest social media platform with 1 billion monthly users is being exploited by opponents who generate fake news. Morrison on Wednesday denied his conservative Liberal Party was behind misleading WeChat posts and doctored accounts that target Labor policies on refugees, taxes and the economy. “That’s not the Liberal Party’s campaign,” Morrison told reporters. “People should be up-front and candid about their policies. That’s what we’re doing.” An extraordinary feature of the Australian political system is that voting is compulsory. So ethnic minorities turn out to vote to avoid a fine even if they are not politically engaged.

The Chinese diaspora in Australia, long regarded as a politically apathetic ethnic minority, are being wooed like never before by political parties who see them as key to winning crucial seats that could decide a general election next week. Maree Ma is general manager of independent Australia-based newspaper Vision China Times, which has 500,000 readers across five Australian cities who are mostly immigrants from mainland China. Ma said her readers were responding to the political messaging and “are really quite engaged.” “Historically, I would say a lot of our readers don’t really care too much about the federal election, people don’t know the candidate and there’s not that many Chinese candidates. But this time around, what we’ve found is people are very interested in this particular federal election,” Ma said. Wanning Sun, a professor at the University of Technology Sydney’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, said WeChat had become far more important than traditional media to Australian politicians attempting to reach Chinese-Australian voters. “To put it bluntly, they actually realize that it is a platform they can’t afford not to use,” Sun said. “The challenge for them is, A: how to use it effectively and, B: how to stop yourself being shafted on WeChat by the opposition. It’s getting quite dirty out there.” She said Labor had learnt a lesson from how the Liberals “very aggressively and effectively” used WeChat to campaign in the east Melbourne seat of Chisholm at the last election in 2016. The government lost 14 seats at that election and Chisholm was the only seat that the Liberals won from Labor. The Labor and Liberal parties are pitting two Chinese-Australian candidates against each other in Chisholm at the election on May 18. Either Liberal candidate Gladys Lui or Labor candidate Jennifer Yang is likely to become the first Chinese Australian woman to be elected to the Australian House of Representatives. Labor lawmaker Penny Wong on Tuesday blamed the Liberal Party for fake campaign news on WeChat.

VIRWC and Labor Party Event