How Long Will it Take for Australia to Wake Up? By James Reed
Another day, another smack across the mouth by the Big Bear. Really is this a life? Will Australia ever grow up and seek economic self-reliance? The theory of social credit and the resources are all there, all that is needed is the poetical and political will to get off the global madhouse. The Covid lockdown, for all its evils, did show that we will not die without migration, international students and all that jazz, and that life would be much better for the ordinary deplorable. Time to get some clean living in our lungs, or we just disappear. Choose.
“China has drastically ramped up its trade conflict with Australia, on Friday slapping a whopping 200% tax on all Australian wine, in a move being widely described as the first shot fired in what went from behind-the-scenes bureaucratic punitive actions to now an open trade war.
"The Ministry of Commerce imposed import taxes of up to 212.1%, effective Saturday, which Australia’s trade minister said make Australian wine unsellable in China, his country’s biggest export market," the AP reports. The lead industry body Wine Australia, said the country's total shipments to China in the first nine months of 2020 accounted for 39% of all Australian wines.
Australia has been among those countries, foremost among them the United States under Trump, leading the charge of criticism aimed at Beijing over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic, lately calling for a formal international probe into the deadly virus' origins there.
This is a very distressing time for many hundreds of Australian wine producers, who have built, in good faith, a sound market in China," Australia trade minister Simon Birmingham responded on Friday.
The growing tensions between the two trade partners has also included tit-for-tat travel restrictions and in a couple notable cases the detention of journalists with dual nationality by Chinese security services. This amid China taking measures early this month to block a wide array of key Australian exports from lobsters to coal.
But as one analyst cited by AP has observed of what's increasingly obvious, Australia has become a "one-trick pony export-wise to China" and thus Beijing holds all the cards, with Canberra scrambling to play on the defensive while China extracts political concessions by threatening to torpedo Australia's commodities exports.
China's Ministry of Commerce justified the wine tariffs as a necessary response after rampant complaints that Chinese producers were hurt by improperly low-priced Australian imports.
If one thinks that this is Chinese hard ball, we have not seen anything yet.
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