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Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has supported an independent investigation into where the coronavirus originated and how it spread earlier this year. China has strongly opposed the proposal and has lobbied all countries that support an investigation.
Chinese anger
The Australian economy has felt the most anger from China. China has made it difficult for Australian companies to export to the country. These are usually verbal orders from Chinese importers not to trade with Australia.
“This method can make the Sino-Australian conflict worse than the US-China trade war,” one exporter told the South China Morning Post.
A new study from the University of Western Australia shows that Chinese sanctions have affected Australian exports, trade and education services worth more than 420 billion NOK.
Some Australian products, including barley, are subject to punitive Chinese tariffs of 80 percent. There are now new sanctions, among other things, targeting Australian red wine, lumber, lobster and sugar.
“Products arriving in Chinese ports before Friday can be imported, but after that time they will not go through customs,” wrote the Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post.
Shellfish were left at Chinese airports this weekend pending shipments to be “checked for heavy metals.”
– Australia has been designated. No other exporter of this type of lobster is under review, Australian Agriculture Minister David Littleproud told Sky News.
The official reason for the timber import ban is that two beetles were found during a timber import in January.
“If these live pests enter China, they will cause serious damage to Chinese forest production and threaten ecological security,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said on Monday.
– Not the China I knew
The Australian government wants talks with China.
– This is very difficult for Australia. We have tried to get in touch, but they reject us. The problem is that they don’t want to have conversations. Instead, they respond with aggressive and loud behavior. It never works with Australia, former US ambassador and finance minister Joe Hockey tells Bloomberg.
Hockey led the negotiations that led to the trade deal with China in 2014.
– This is not the China I knew when I was finance minister, he says.
No industrialized country is more dependent on China than Australia. China is the country’s largest and most important trading partner. 28 per cent of Australian agricultural exports ended up in China in 2019. Now Australia is in the first recession in 30 years.
Precarious financial situation
The Australian central bank is meeting for an interest rate meeting on Tuesday. The key policy rate was already at a record low of 0.25 percent after it fell during the crown outbreak in March. The interest rate was reduced to 0.1 percent.
– It’s not a question of whether the interest rate will be lowered, but when, market analyst Kyle Rodda told the news.com.au website before the meeting.
The city of Melbourne was almost completely closed for 112 days in an attempt to control the spread of the crown and reopened only last week.
– The central bank said earlier this year that 0.25 percent was an effective minimum. A new interest rate cut reflects how precarious the financial situation is, chief analyst Graham Cooke of fintech company Finder tells the website.(Terms)Copyright Dagens Næringsliv AS and / or our suppliers. We would like you to share our cases via a link, which leads directly to our pages. Copying or other use of all or part of the content can only be done with written permission or as permitted by law. For more terms, see here.
