Mining billionaire Andrew Forrest might be keen as mustard on getting back to business as usual with China and getting those billions in iron ore contracts flowing back into his pockets, but ordinary Australians aren’t quite so keen.
Public disquiet has been quietly growing for years, as premium Australian produce flows to China and locals are left to pick through overpriced seconds, and strategic food-producing land is cherry-picked by the communist dictatorship’s nomenklatura.
With the health, social and economic devastation unleashed on the world by Beijing and its lies about the Chinese virus, anger is growing white-hot. There are growing calls to put an end to Chinese purchase of Australian assets – even to seize Chinese-owned assets in lieu of compensation from the Chinese dictatorship for devastation caused by the Chinese virus.
If nothing else, Australian consumers want to be able to better avoid Chinese-made goods.
Shoppers are pleading with Woolworths and Coles to make it easier for them to identify Australian products when perusing for groceries.
An IGA store on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland announced its new “Australian owned” shelf labels on Monday, sparking customers to call on other major retailers to follow suit.
I’ve personally avoided Chinese-manufactured foods for some time – not from any animosity to Chinese, but for the same reason that Chinese consumers pillage Australian-made products such as baby formula. I just don’t trust Chinese-made foods. This has meant carefully perusing the labels of products at my favourite Asian grocery store.
Now, some stores are doing the hard work for their customers.
Maleny Supa IGA shared photos of the labels, also known as wobblers, to Facebook in a show of support for Australian-run companies.
“New shelf wobblers to make it easier to spot our Australian owned suppliers,” the store’s Facebook post read.
Hundreds of customers expressed their support of the move, with some taking to the social media pages of Coles and Woolworths to suggest they too adopt the move.
“IGA are doing this. Can Woolworths do the same?” one person wrote on the latter supermarket giant’s Facebook page, with another saying they would “like to see this in my local Woolworths store”.
A Woolies employee replied, saying the suggestion would be passed “on to our team”.
No doubt the usual race grievance-mongers will screech about “racism”, but that’s nonsense. I’ll continue to patronise the local Asian grocers. I’ll happily buy products from Asian countries with better reputations than China (which is to say, most of them).
In the meantime, if Beijing’s lackey in Australia thought he was intimidating Australian consumers by threatening that China will stop scarfing up Australia’s premium produce while dumping its cheap manufactures here, he miscalculated badly. Social media in Australia has lit up in celebration.
Tasmanians got a taste of the fruits of a Chinese boycott earlier this year, when local crayfish, normally expensive and hard to obtain, was going for a song. Exporters who had grown fat on the Chinese yuan cried poor, but ordinary Tasmanians uncorked their local cool-climate whites and enjoyed the rare luxury of cheap, local crays.
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