I do not have COL shares but a member of my family does. My...

I do not have COL shares but a member of my family does. My spouse has WOW shares, in the interests of full disclosure.

Yesterday COL Director Wendy Stops was reported in 'The Australian' and elsewhere as stating 'upfront criticism is not the way to deal with (mainland communist) China'.

Like BSL, DXS and FMG Director Penny Bingham-Hall who made similar comments, whatever these women know about business, it appears they don't know much about how mainland China operates.

I and millions of other Australians elected the Liberal-Nationals to become our Federal Government. It's appropriate that foreign affairs is left to ScoMo and his Ministers.

It's evident from public opinion surveys that around 80 per cent of Australians have a dim view of Marxist China.

The most recent reasons include how it's targeted Australian exporters of wine, timber and sundry other products because Australia - quite rightly - won't act in a subservient fashion to this authoritarian regime, which to add to its woes is suggested as the source of deadly novel coronavirus, the latest suggestion being it 'escaped' from a Wuhan, mainland China laboratory. Democatic Taiwan has handled the virus far better than mainland China, Hong Kongers are being persecuted (ask the former Catholic Archbishop about that) as are a million Muslims in a farflung province.

Ms Stops and Mrs Bingham Hall need to read Clive Hamilton in 'The Australian' today. It's a lengthy article, but tellingly, he says:

Certain former prime ministers, premiers, mining magnates, vice-chancellors, strategic analysts and Sinologists are all telling the government to appease Beijing. And some of the leaders of the industries being squeezed by China’s trade bans have become, in effect, mouthpieces for Beijing, calling on the government to “fix the relationship”, as if it’s all our fault. This is exactly what Beijing planned.

But in democracies political parties want to win elections above all else. Most Australians have been woken from their slumber and now see China as a serious threat to the democratic practices that for too long they had taken for granted.

With an election due at the end of this year or early next, the public must therefore watch both sides of politics closely for any signs of wavering. If our leaders go weak at the knees then the rest of the world is imperilled.

This COL Director, Ms Stops, urgently needs to stay silent and let our elected leaders decide what is in Australia's interests. If we have to suffer in economic terms to a minor degree for a while, so be it.

The alternative of becoming a client state of the Marxist Chinese and seeing it achieve world domination, as Nigel Farage of the UK (who led Brexit) says is its aim, is chilling.

Money isn't everything in life, Ms Stops, and sometimes one has to take short term pain for long term gain.