An Australian state lawmaker has revealed that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) set up a website to criticise him after he criticised an Australian public broadcaster for airing programs that “vilified” a religious minority persecuted by the CCP.
Liberal Democrats MP David Limbrick was speaking in Victoria’s state Parliament on Nov. 11 on a motion about trade with China and its blocking of Australian exports, when he drew attention to what he described as the “shameful” export of CCP propaganda by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).
Limbrick was talking about ABC programs that cast aspersions on Falun Gong (Falun Dafa) and painted its beliefs in a negative light. The ABC’s mischaracterisation of Falun Gong and its teachings were disputed by the Falun Dafa Association—but these ultimately went unheeded, including warnings that the CCP would use ABC’s reports to further its persecution in China. Which it did.
Falun Gong is a spiritual discipline of the Buddhist and Taoist traditions whose adherents strive to follow its core tenets of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. The practice was first taught publicly in 1992 in Changchun, China. It grew to have an estimated 100 million practitioners in 1999 when CCP leader Jiang Zemin unilaterally launched a persecution campaign aimed at eradicating the practice.
Limbrick said he knew many Falun Gong practitioners through his role as an MP.
“They’re a peaceful group of people who courageously stand up against persecution from the Chinese Communist Party to practice their beliefs that in many ways are no more unusual than many Christian denominations,” he said.
This is why he was shocked to see the ABC vilify Falun Gong in programs and reports that “repeated a number of Chinese Communist Party talking points.”
“If this program had referred to nearly any other religious minority in Australia, the producers would been accused of hate crimes,” Limbrick said.
A CCP agency specifically set up to persecute Falun Gong, the 610 office—named for the date of its creation on June 10, 1999—immediately leveraged ABC’s program to justify its persecution of Falun Gong.
On July 17, a website set up under the umbrella of the 610 office with the express purpose of defaming Falun Gong lauded ABC’s program and claimed the CCP has been “warning the world” about the spiritual practice.
“They actually set up a webpage on me. They started criticising me directly because I dared to defend freedom of religion and criticise the ABC,” Limbrick said.
Limbrick said that in the days that followed the broadcast of ABC’s program, he had heard of Falun Gong practitioners in Australia being abused by members of the public “as a direct consequence of this program.”
“I would like to see free trade with China but I would urge the ABC to stop using taxpayers money to export propaganda about persecuted minorities to the Chinese government,” he said.
Liberal MP Bernie Finn rose to congratulate Limbrick “on his contribution” and expressed his own support for Falun Gong.
“I too have had a great deal to do with Falun Gong practitioners and their associated supporters now over a number of years, and they are good people,” Finn said. “They are very good people. They do not deserve the persecution and they do not deserve the treatment that they have received from the barbarians in Beijing, and that is the flat-out truth.”
Limbrick lodged a complaint with the ABC on the grounds it might have breached its policies on inciting undeserved stigmatization of a vulnerable religious minority. He said the ABC launched its own investigation and found themselves innocent, and he has taken his complaint further to the Australian Communications and Media Authority.
The ABC program presented, almost exclusively, the experiences of some disaffected people who interacted with or knew Falun Gong practitioners and made a limp effort to provide a right of reply.
