Ted O’Brien’s remarkable journey to Australia’s legislative halls includes a unique chapter rarely experienced by fellow Australians or Westerners: a venture into the enigmatic city of Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital.
Before stepping into the political arena as an MP, Ted O’Brien served as the Opposition’s foreign affairs spokesperson, immersing himself in the diverse cultures and dynamics across Asia.
During his tenure in Beijing, where he resided with his wife, Sophia, who was associated with the International Crisis Group, a rare opportunity presented itself. In 2010, O’Brien joined a select group of fifteen individuals set to explore the hermit kingdom.
The invitation aligned with the 65th anniversary celebrations of North Korea’s ruling Workers’ Party. It was a significant historical moment, marking the end of Kim Jong-il’s era and the ascension of his son, Kim Jong-Un.
“The North Koreans meticulously orchestrated every facet,” O’Brien recounted to SBS News, “yet it’s impossible to conceal every nuance.”
He spent most of the visit in the North Korean capital, arriving by air and leaving by train through northern China.
The Australian government now lists North Korea in the “do not travel” category on its official Smartraveller advice portal.
The access O’Brien had to the secretive nation is rare.
“You’d hop in a bus, you’d go to a school and you’d meet a few parents and school kids. Then you’d go to a small shopping strip, and you’d realise the kids from the school, the same kids at the shopping strip.”
“It’d be like this theatre that would follow us around trying to portray a very different North Korea.”
One encounter with reality came, perhaps ironically, at the sprawling Kumsusan Palace of the Sun, where the state’s leaders are buried, and it serves as the sacred centre of the North Korean mythos.
O’Brien says the “organisers muddled things up” and his tour ended up sharing a room with a group of workers, the best in each of their factories, given the coveted opportunity to pay their respects.
“This was the moment of their life … wearing their best possible, albeit all the same uniform,” O’Brien recounts.
“That is where you saw their real poverty, and it sounds crude to say it, but you could smell the poverty, you could see the poverty, the eyes completely focusing down.
“And this is people’s most happy day in their life. That will always stay with me of just a human reminder of what an authoritarian regime can mean.”
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After working across Asia, including Taiwan and China, O’Brien was elected to the seat of Fairfax in 2016, and now the Coalition’s foreign affairs spokesperson has been putting his “rusty” Mandarin skills to use, fronting Liberal Party messaging on Chinese language social media, and giving speeches in the language.
“I’m a big believer that there’s nothing more important than national unity,” he explains.
“I think national unity is a critical part of our national security. It is vitally important if we are to withstand coercion as a country.”
While describing English as Australia’s “primary language”, O’Brien says politicians also need to “respect the dignity of the individual”, claiming English as a “far harder” language to learn than Chinese.
“If an individual is still struggling to engage with our national language, well, let me engage with him or her in their language if we can, so they understand that once they become an Australian, they are absolutely part of our family as Aussies.”
The last Liberal Party review was scathing about the party’s struggles to engage with multicultural communities, identifying “the party’s capacity to thoughtlessly offend groups, including the Chinese” as a “widespread problem”, and singling out how Jane Hume’s remarks about “Chinese spies” were successfully weaponised by Labor in the final days of the campaign.
O’Brien argued his in-language approach was driven by a “genuine desire to ensure we have unity in Australia”, saying he’s picked up on concerns among Chinese Australian voters about Beijing’s ethnic unity laws.
“They need to know that their country is absolutely with them, that there’s nothing more important than being an Australian.”
Separately, O’Brien was partially successful in pressuring the government to amend updated foreign arrangements laws to force greater scrutiny of academics’ independent research.
The Coalition had voiced concerns that a loophole in the laws allowed researchers to independently collaborate with institutions from so-called “rogue” states, without Commonwealth oversight.
“If it falls under the auspices of a university, then the Commonwealth knows about it. But if the professor decides to do it on his own without the university banner, the Commonwealth doesn’t know about it. The risk is the same to the Australian people,” he said.
This week, Foreign Minister Penny Wong intervened to shut down an ANU partnership with China’s Shandong University by 2027. It followed a Pentagon call to blacklist the institution over concerns about its research links with the Chinese state.
“What we have to have is risk-aware engagement; that’s the approach we’ve taken, that’s the approach we need,” Wong said.