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Scott Morrison has sought to capitalise on his opponent being locked away in COVID-19 isolation, taking aim at Deputy Labor leader Richard Marles and accusing him of being soft on China.
Mr Morrison has spent weeks focusing solely on Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese, but with the Labor leader off the campaign trail, the Prime Minister has moved his attention to the ALP's frontbench.
The controversial security pact between Solomon Islands and China has featured heavily in the federal election campaign this week, with Labor accusing the Coalition of a massive foreign policy blunder in allowing the agreement to be signed.
Government ministers have seized on a speech Mr Marles delivered in China in September 2019, where he said he was "very cognisant of the growing role that China was playing in providing development assistance in the Pacific".
"Let me be crystal clear: that was and has been a good thing," he told the Beijing Foreign Studies University.
"The Pacific needs help and Australia needs to welcome any country willing to provide it.
"Certainly the Pacific Island Countries themselves do."
It is not the first time the speech has been cited in Coalition attacks against Mr Marles.
In February, the Prime Minister quoted from the address in Parliament before his now-infamous "Manchurian candidate" description of the deputy Labor leader – a comment he was quickly forced to withdraw.
Mr Marles and other senior Labor frontbenchers are likely to take a much more high-profile role in the campaign, while Mr Albanese is in isolation for a week following his positive COVID-19 diagnosis.
"The person who would want to be Deputy Prime Minister in a Labor government, Richard Marles, actually was advocating for the Chinese government to do exactly what they are now doing, and it would be absurd for Australia to try and resist that," Mr Morrison told Channel Nine.
"I find it outrageous that Labor would criticise us when their own deputy leader was actually advocating what the Chinese government has been seeking to do in our region."
Marles hits back over remarks
Mr Marles accused the Prime Minister and Coalition MPs of wilfully misinterpreting his remarks.
"Pacific nations have their own choices that they can make, and it is precisely because of that that we need to be making sure that we earn the right to be the natural partner of choice for countries in the Pacific," he told the ABC.
"When we were in government, we were winning the strategic contest with China in the Pacific.
"I would never have imagined that the Morrison government could stuff things up so badly as they have now that we would see this security agreement signed between China and Solomon Islands."
Morrison defends government's decision making
Mr Morrison continued to reject suggestions his government mishandled the situation in the Solomons, and left a power vacuum in the South Pacific that China filled.
Australian government MPs and officials have complained in private about China paying money into a development fund that is distributed directly to Solomon Islands MPs.
The Prime Minister was asked whether he believed Chinese money had flowed into the country, in a bid to shore up support for the controversial security pact.
"We are very well aware of what China has done in many other countries around the world, and we have a very good understanding about how they operate in the Pacific," he told Channel Seven.
When pressed on whether that was confirmation of bribery, he simply repeated his position.
"It sounds like that they don't play by the same rules," he said.
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