One thing became immediately clear in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic: Australia’s big business sector is lazy, greedy and unutterably stupid. Not to mention treacherously incapable of learning from bitter experience. How else to explain their crawling desperation to toady to China again.
It’s not just the ethical problems of willingly dealing with a brutal communist dictatorship: the same regime that not only historically murdered some 70 million of its own people, but still runs massive concentration camps that torture and, allegedly, murder and harvest the organs of dissidents and minorities. The same Australian businessmen who virtue signal about abolishing modern slavery, at the same time owe their billion-dollar fortunes entirely to one of the world’s largest slave-owning states.
But their hypocritical greed is nothing compared to their blind stupidity and goldfish memories.
In 2020, China summarily banned most of Australia’s most lucrative exports, from coal to barley, beef, cotton, lamb, lobsters, timber and wine. Their obvious motivation was then-PM Scott Morrison’s endorsement of an investigation into the origins of Covid-19 – which we now know almost certainly originated in a Chinese government lab. Business shrieked and wailed – but didn’t dare criticise China. Instead, they blamed the PM we now know was absolutely right.
Showcasing their lazy stupidity, the same businesses not only failed to find alternative markets, but rushed with greedy eagerness as soon as China, which had proved itself to be a most unreliable trading partner, deigned to relent. They still haven’t learned, even as China summarily suspends imports again and warns of more to come.
Worse, though, is the showcasing of their treacherousness: the same businesses, who didn’t dare mouth a word of criticism of a communist dictatorship, screeched like banshees when the world’s leading democracy imposed a piddling 10 per cent tariff on their goods. Hypocritically, none of them conceded that Australia imposes a 10 per cent tax on all US imports.
The whole China fiasco should have been an object lesson: don’t trust China. Decouple your business model from a capricious communist dictatorship. They didn’t learn though. Stupid. Greedy. Treacherous.
The US government is rightly calling them out.
The Trump administration is calling for allies to “decouple” from Beijing and unite behind Washington if China moves to take over global supply chains after the Communist nation gave notice of a massive expansion of rare earth export controls.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer made the appeal for allies to oppose the Chinese measures, unveiled last week, noting the new rules could halt the flow of smartphones, cars and even household appliances across the globe.
Speaking in Washington, Mr Bessent said China had proved itself to be an unreliable partner to the world and that the Trump administration had been speaking to its allies to work together.
Try telling that to the mining billionaires who’ve made their vast fortunes by literally selling their country by the shipload to China.
While the US and its partners did not want an economic decoupling, he said there would be no other choice if China refused to de-escalate.
“If China wants to be an unreliable partner to the world, then the world will have to decouple,” Mr Bessent said. “The world does not want to decouple. We want to de-risk. But signals like this are signs of decoupling, which we don’t believe China wants.
“This should be a clear sign to our allies that we must work together, and work together we will. There will be a series of meetings this week during World Bank, IMF week and we are all aligned. Not only is China fuelling Russia’s war, but China’s actions have once again demonstrated the risk of being dependent on them, on rare earths and for that matter anything.”
Not to mention that China has literally stolen billions of dollars of intellectual property, year on year, for decades. Yet, stupid, greedy big businesses keep dealing with them.
These people deserve to go broke.
