In a way, you almost had to feel sorry for Anthony Albanese, finally going into his delayed first meeting with the US president. Almost. Because Albanese is, to borrow Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s apt metaphor, trying to walk a barbed-wire fence with a foot in each paddock.
On the one hand, Albanese is drawn by his natural inclinations as an ’80s student communist, and by the feral-left Labor rank-and-file, to the Chinese orbit. Labor’s infatuation with China goes back to the dawn of its modern period, when Whitlam scurried off to kowtow to the Mao regime even as the Cultural Revolution was murdering millions more Chinese. In recent decades, Labor has repeatedly trousered massive donations from CCP-linked figures, while party elders like Keating and Carr relentlessly shill for the Xi regime.
But, undergraduate student politicking is all fun and games until the harsh teeth of geopolitics sink in. In case Albanese is inclined to overlook it, China just keeps reminding him that it’s a communist dictatorship after all. Albanese can kowtow on the carpet at Beijing as often as he likes – four times, so far – but the Xi regime has a way of putting its lapdogs in their place.
If it isn’t summarily suspending trade to punish the government, or deliberately threatening RAN divers in the South China sea with dangerous sonar pulses, China is sailing massive naval fleets along Australia’s coastline in an ostentatious warning. Now, on the very day Albanese met Trump, China sent another blunt reminder.
China said it took “powerful countermeasures” to expel an Australian surveillance jet from airspace Beijing claims over the South China Sea after a PLA fighter jet fired flares into the path of a RAAF plane.
Beijing propagandists are celebrating the assertive behaviour and have cast Australia as a “small country” in need of “a lesson”.
Got the message, Little Albo?
The PLA has become increasingly confrontational in its encounters with America and American allies in waters and airspace around the South China Sea.
China claims almost the entire South China Sea as its own despite a 2016 international tribunal ruling repudiating its so-called “nine dash line” territorial boundary. Beijing denounced the international court’s finding as a “piece of waste paper”.
Albanese finds himself in the position of the proverbial student socialist who actually has to go out and get a job. He’ll still wear his Karl Marx T-shirts, but, hey, those bills aren’t going away. Deep inside, he knows it’s the capitalist system putting a roof over his head and food on the table, but he’ll still doodle hammers and sickles on his memo pad.
So it is that, for all his wistful gazing west of Japan, Albanese grudgingly has to admit that Australia’s real strategic interest still lies with big, bad, Uncle Sam. Besides, Uncle Sam wants something Australia has and is willing to pay for – the bills of Albanese’s reckless spending aren’t going away, remember.
Anthony Albanese and Donald Trump have signed an $US8.5bn ($13.5bn) framework agreement shifting the supply of critical minerals and rare earths away from China while bolstering the commercial and defence industries of Australia and the US.
Under the agreement, both nations will now move within their separate regulatory systems to slash red tape and fast-track approval timelines for critical minerals and rare earths projects.
That red tape is going to be another barbed-wire fence Albanese has to walk. On the one hand, Labor has the country straining under the yoke of increasingly Byzantine environmental legislation. A situation made even worse by the growing power of the Aboriginal industry, for whom something as trifling as a referendum is of no concern to their undisguised power grab. So it is that a made-up group of fake Aborigines nobody’s ever heard of can stop a billion-dollar mining project in its tracks, with some entirely fabricated oogabooga nonsense about a supposed ‘blue-banded bee dreaming’.
We can well imagine the Trump administration’s impatience with such blatant nonsense. In WWII, union intransigence – or, as author and historian Hal Colebatch put it, treason – on Australian docks so frustrated the American command that troops were dispatched to directly manage stevedoring operations. How will the US administration react when a strategically vital critical mineral and rare earths development is blocked by a bunch of white pretend-Aborigines playing dress ups?
Certainty will be provided to these projects through the adoption of a new pricing framework – including through the setting of “price-floors or similar measures” – to help guard against “non-market policies and unfair trade practices.”
They mean China.
Stronger rules will also be implemented to review and deter the sale of critical minerals and rare earths on national security grounds when required, while both Australia and the US will work with other nations to uphold secure supply chains.
Again, they mean China.
In an echo of the incomprehensible masochism of big businesses that continually grovel to China, no matter how brutally it treats them, or how much of their intellectual property it steals, Western nations have idiotically allowed China to dominate the global rare-earths industry.
The time to decouple the rest of the global economy from China is long, long past.
