Perfect storm brewing

As we pressed “send” on yesterday’s column, noting the volume of bad-news stories relating to China–Australia relations, it was reported that Beijing appears to have officially blacklisted Australian coal for the foreseeable future. The Chinese government sure knows how to hit where it hurts. Australian coal exports to China were worth $14 billion last year, and, for the many coal-lovers in the Coalition, the one argument for the industry’s continued existence – the financial one – has just been crushed. It was hard enough justifying a project such as Adani’s Carmichael mine before; now it looks ridiculous. Trade Minister Simon Birmingham has urged China to clarify the reported ban, calling it unacceptable and discriminatory, while Scott Morrison somewhat hopefully called the reports “media speculation”, and warned that a blacklisting would “obviously be in breach of WTO rules and our own free-trade agreements, so we would hope that it is not the case”. It’s a lot more than media speculation, of course. And it’s hardly coincidental that this news has arrived hard on the heels of the stoushes over Australian iron ore. Where is all this heading?

Australian businesses are going to suffer, and people are going to get hurt. Journalist Anna Krien has been tracking a terrible situation involving sailors marooned off the coast of China, on ships full of Australian coal. For up to eight months, these ships have been unable to offload their cargo into Chinese ports due to an informal government ban. “China doesn’t want it. The seller won’t leave. A game of chicken except these men’s lives are at stake. Three are on suicide watch,” Krien reported via Twitter. “Their medicine has run out. The water they are being supplied with is bad – causing rashes that won’t heal and [are] pus-filled. They have families. One sailor’s father back home in India has died, his mother is dying.”

Some of the stranded seafarers haven’t been allowed to disembark for 20 months due to COVID-19. Do Birmingham, Morrison, Canavan, Pitt and Payne care about these workers? Does the Minerals Council? Let alone the hundreds of thousands of workers in the other sectors hit by China’s abrupt strikes on Australian products.

Talk about chickens coming home to roost: as the rest of the world’s developed nations pressure a recalcitrant Australia into climate action, our largest trading partner kneecaps our coal trade. The Coalition MPs who have spent so much effort propping up a dirty, dying industry have just been spanked.

So, what can we expect now from the Australian government? An honest appraisal of the global diplomatic situation, and an admission that coal and gas are in permanent decline, and that renewables are the only way forward?

Judging on past performance, our Coalition leaders won’t admit fault or backtrack in any way. It’s just not in their nature. Especially when Essential polling shows that 62 per cent of people “believe Australia is a victim in the trade war rather than making itself a target by the government publicly criticising the Chinese regime (38%)”.

Regardless of where responsibility lies in the ongoing trade fights, and regardless of whether China is “playing fair” or not (or even cares), Australia faces a near future in which most of its major export industries are either smashed or subject to immense instability: iron ore, coal, education, tourism, livestock and agriculture (including wheat, barley, wine, seafood etc). Not all of this is China’s fault, of course, but it’s hard to avoid the sense that there’s a perfect storm brewing: COVID, China, climate change, all converging.    

With our recent record on climate change and human rights, we don’t even have our good name to trade on.

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