Ex-foreign minister Alexander Downer says Australia won't be cowed by Chinese envoy's unprecedented 'rogue' behavior

Australia's longest serving foreign minister says not since the Cold War has he seen a foreing ambassador behave as "recklessly" as China's envoy to Australia did this week, ABC News Australia reports.

The Australian government has described Chinese Ambassador Jingye Cheng's comments in an interview with the Australian Financial Review as "threats of economic coercion."

Cheng suggested the Chinese public may boycott Australian products or decide not to visit Australia in the future if the government continued its push for an inquiry into the origins of coronavirus disease.

"If the mood is going from bad to worse, people would think 'Why should we go to such a country that is not so friendly to China?'," he told the paper.

"Maybe the ordinary people will say 'why should we drink Australian wine? Eat Australian beef?'"

Former foreign minister Alexander Downer says the ambassador's conduct is almost unprecedented.

"Not since the days of the Soviet Union have I seen an ambassador behave in such a reckless, undiplomatic way. And what is the problem? I mean the Prime Minister [Scott Morrison] has just said that there should be an investigation," he told ABC RN's Between The Lines.

"The Chinese ambassador's reaction is as though China has been cornered and told that it's guilty.

"We're not going to be bullied by an ambassador who's gone rogue in Canberra."

He says while China can "of course decide that they don't want to import anything from anywhere around the world", that would hurt an economy already suffering as a result of the coronavirus crisis.

"I mean it's just a completely absurd proposition," Downer said.

Downer says there must be an impartial investigation into the cause of the outbreak.

"The global economy has been brought to a halt, 200,000 people are dead as a result of it," he said.

"We've got to investigate it. And we've got to find out how it happened. And I'm very surprised that the Chinese should be so resistant to getting to the heart of what happened."

Unlike current Foreign Minister Marise Payne, Downer says the WHO should lead the inquiry.

"It should be led by the World Health Organization, it should include epidemiologists and other scientists from a variety of different countries, including but not exclusively Western countries and obviously people from China," he says.

"It should be wide-ranging, it needs to try to establish how this happened. Not to investigate the behaviour of the Chinese government, I don't think that is going to be very politic, but to investigate how this virus broke out.

"That is what we need to investigate and that's what we need to understand. So we never see it happen again."