West Australian Premier Mark McGowan has blasted Peter Dutton for his "highly dangerous" rhetoric regarding a Chinese warship off Australia's west coast.
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"It's inflammatory and unnecessary and I just think he's the biggest threat to the national security," the Labor Premier said of the Defence Minister's tough talk about China on Friday.
Mr Dutton called the Chinese military vessel's path down Australia's west coast in waters near Perth "an aggressive act", but admitted it had not entered Australia's territorial waters.
Mr McGowan said he had no idea where the Chinese ship was heading, but that barely mattered as Australia and its allies also send warships into other countries' exclusive economic zones - which under the United Nations' Law of the Sea extends to 200 nautical miles off the coast and outside territorial waters.
"I think we need to be very careful about language," Mr McGowan said "You're essentially giving other countries the opportunity to say the same thing about us while we adhere to the law and send ships through other countries' exclusive economic zones, including China."
The Premier, who was a legal officer in the navy prior to entering politics, said the Law of the Sea was created to protect interests like fishing rights and oil and gas mining rights. It was never designed to stop the transit of ships, he said.
"All this rhetoric by Mr Dutton is just politics. His language around war, around 'We've got to be prepared to fight', all this sort of stuff that's gone on for the last year is highly dangerous, and it's against the national interest.
"Mr Dutton was just trying to stir up fear and all that sort of thing to try and win votes."
Other senior Coalition figures did not repeat the Defence Minister's description of the warship's path as an aggressive act. The Prime Minister, when pressed by reporters on Friday, declined to repeat the language and said no international laws had been breached in the ship's movement.
Labor leader Anthony Albanese was campaigning in Western Australia with the Premier to announce that Labor would fund a new medical centre when Mr McGowan made the national security comments on Monday.
Federal Labor would work with state and territory governments to improve health outcomes, Anthony Albanese.
"We want to work with Mark McGowan and with other state governments around the country to deliver better health outcomes," Mr Albanese said.
Mr McGowan said the new medical centre would ease the "enormous" pressure on hospitals.
"Every state is going through it. Making sure that there is additional state and federal investment into providing those opportunities for surgery, particularly the non-urgent surgeries, so we can have the hospitals dealing with the urgent surgery is an important initiative that we have worked cooperatively with the federal opposition on," he said.