Julie Bishop in Porta Vila, Vanuatu.

Despite Fairfax’s “China set for Vanuatu military base” yarn falling in a heap, it has doubled down on the hype of a Chinese military threat to Australia. “China eyes Vanuatu military base in plan with global ramifications,” was the headline on the original story, though David Wroe’s actual piece was far more circumspect — he reported “preliminary discussions… about a military build-up… no formal proposals have been put to Vanuatu’s government, senior security officials believe Beijing’s plans could culminate in a full military base.”

Thus the base existed more in the minds of Australian “senior security officials” than in reality.

That didn’t stop other Fairfax commentators and various national security chinstrokers from going into overdrive. A Chinese base “would be the equivalent of Australia being placed in check”, according to Peter Hartcher. “There is nothing between Vanuatu and Queensland bar the Coral Sea,” he wrote, conjuring images of Chinese ships sailing unimpeded to invade Mackay. “The lights will burn bright in Russell tonight as a result of this,” predicted Malcolm Davis of the taxpayer-funded neoconservative thinktank ASPI. The Lowy Institute’s Jonathan Pryke declared it “it would be a provocative gesture and our cautious and more balanced approach may not last into the future.” Far-right MPs Andrew Hastie and Jim Molan weighed in to express alarm. Malcolm Turnbull declared it would be “of great concern”.

ANU and the Lowy Institute’s Rory Medcalf was more sceptical. “If true, there would be significant cause for concern,” he wrote, but thought there were more questions than answers. He was right. Not merely did the Chinese deny the story — well, they would, wouldn’t they — but the Vanuatu government denied it. “No one in the Vanuatu government has ever talked about a Chinese military base in Vanuatu of any sort,” said Vanuatu foreign minister Ralph Regenvanu, who also told the BBC he was “not very happy about the standard of reporting in the Australian media”.

Undeterred, Fairfax doubled down today with a piece from Wroe in Vanuatu about the Chinese presence there, especially the “a huge, high-walled compound hard to reconcile with the typical diplomatic work needed in a small country of just 280,000 people.” It was, he said, a “hulking” compound. But actual concern by local people about China was hard to find. There was water seller Jackie Willie, who thought “it is going to change everything” (it wasn’t clear what “it” was, but he was concerned about relations with China). “The Chinese take over everything so there is no chance for Vanuatu people,” said a woman selling fruit. The value of having Fairfax’s national security specialist vox-popping people on the streets of Port Vila wasn’t quite clear from the article.

For a glimpse of the opposite mindset, look no further than one of the fully paid-up members of the China Lobby, former ambassador to Beijing Geoff Raby, who in the pages of the Financial Review declared that Australia was “strategically confused” and that “President Xi Jinping was at the height of his powers and unchallenged in the exercise of his authority in the recently concluded National People’s Congress.”

That’s one way of putting Xi’s declaration of permanent personal dictatorship, but of course the China Lobby prefers to skate over such minor issues as autocracy, lack of rule of law and basic rights. Echoing Beijing’s talking points (in exactly the manner Clive Hamilton noted about all members of the China Lobby in his recent book), Raby lashed out at Australia’s participation in “the poorly conceived quadrilateral dialogue where Australia aligns itself closely with China’s strategic competitors”. In the eyes of Beijing and its enthusiastic western boosters, even discussions with other regional democracies like Japan, India and the United States are an offence.

Surely we can do better in domestic discussion of China than poorly founded hype from one side of the debate and parroting of Beijing’s talking points from the other?