Chinese warships may head to WA to circumnavigate Australia with a sharp message

Chinese warships are now in the Great Australian Bight and could be headed past Perth as the Asian giant shows off the might of its navy.

Australia has been tracking the trio of ships, known as the People’s Liberation Army-Navy Task Group 107, since they moved through the Coral Sea and Torres Strait a fortnight ago.

Their live fire exercises conducted with no notice while they were travelling south between Australia and New Zealand caused the diversion of 49 flights and sparked a political fight between the Albanese Government and the Coalition this week.

By Thursday morning the ships had travelled around Tasmania and were headed into the Great Australian Bight.

Peter Dean, the United States Studies Centre’s foreign policy and defence director, said Chinese warships have operated off the northwest coast of WA on multiple occasions – albeit, without the added excitement of live firing.

“This is the east coast getting a taste of what it’s like to live in Western Australia,” he said.

“They’ve only come down to do intelligence collecting tasks in the past so this is a little bit different with the type of vessels that they’ve brought down and the behaviour they’ve done.”

Adding to the intrigue is the presence of an American Virginia-class nuclear submarine, the USS Minnesota, that is currently docked at HMAS Stirling.

It it the first of several US submarines scheduled to visit Perth this year as the rotations through WA under the AUKUS arrangements step up.

There is no legal requirement under the law of the sea for China to give notice of where its navy travels, unless it enters Australia’s territorial waters, closer to the coastline.

Professor Dean said it was probably 50-50 on whether the Chinese ships would continue heading west and circumnavigate Australia, or turn around and back the way they’ve come.

But the answer to that question would lay bare China’s intentions with the military excursion.

If they wanted to make port visits or engage with other countries, they would turn around and head back towards where other nations were locations.

“The Chinese are not on their way to anywhere. We’re not on the way to anywhere. We’re at the bottom of Asia, there’s nowhere else to go,” Professor Dean said.

“So they’re here for one reason and one reason only, and that is a demonstration of their power and to make some military and political points. If they go to Western Australia, that will become an even sharper message.”

Defence Minister Richard Marles said it was “completely possible” the Chinese navy would end up circumnavigating Australia – continuing east then heading up along WA’s coast.

“What we will do is surveil them, firstly to ascertain that they are acting in accordance with international law – and to this point in time they have, a very important point to understand, even in the context of the live firing,” he told Sky News.

“In an ongoing sense, the most important thing is for us to be able to observe all their movements, all their formations so that at the end of the day we can reach an assessment about what is being sought to be achieved by this mission on the part of the Chinese.”

Shadow minister Andrew Hastie said it seemed very likely since the warships were in the Bight they would continue up WA’s coast.

“This is a global navy projecting sea power,” he told The West.

Earlier, he labelled the move “gunboat diplomacy”.