Comment

Paul Bongiorno
The importance of China mates

The cockney rhyming slang, traditionally beloved of Australians, would have it that our old china plates in America are causing us more anxiety than our newer ones in North Asia.

The prime minister is winging his way to Beijing for a week of high-level meetings and business roundtable discussions. Before he boarded his VIP jet for the 14-hour flight, Anthony Albanese emphasised the importance of the trip.

“China remains Australia’s largest trading partner, accounting for almost one third of our total trade, and will remain so for our foreseeable future,” Albanese said, adding that he will “patiently and deliberately work towards a stable relationship with China with dialogue at its core”.

Earlier in the week, China’s ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian, held out the prospect of even broader economic ties between our two nations, especially in light of the disruption to the global trading order being caused by our closest strategic partner, the United States.

China, according to its ambassador, takes far more seriously its free trade agreement with Australia than does Donald Trump’s America. On the 10th anniversary of the China–Australia Free Trade Agreement, Beijing is offering to review the agreement and “actively explore new growth areas in emerging fields like artificial intelligence, healthcare, green energy and the digital economy, elevating practical co-operation to new heights”, Xiao wrote in The Australian Financial Review.

Beijing’s overtures have the China hawks apoplectic, especially in light of their reading of the prime minister’s John Curtin Oration as crab-walking away from the US alliance.

Albanese cited the wartime Labor prime minister saying the party had “never followed the flags of other lands or patterned itself on the movements which originated in other places”.

The prime minister said “we remember Curtin not just because he looked to America. We honour him because he spoke for Australia.”

In a statement to Nine newspapers, Opposition Leader Sussan Ley said the speech would damage our standing in Washington at the very time when the AUKUS agreement is under sceptical review. “Now is a time to build our influence in Washington, not diminish it,” she said.

Her Coalition colleague Barnaby Joyce was more strident, noting Albanese’s next meeting with Xi Jinping, the leader “of a totalitarian regime”, will be his fourth, while he hasn’t met Trump once. Joyce, who has confided to a colleague that he doesn’t intend to run again for parliament, said we should be friends with China “but not at the expense of the United States of America”.

Albanese is accused of not resolving a contradiction between our pursuit of AUKUS, which enmeshes us even more within Washington’s orbit, and his assertion of sovereign independence and pursuit of a more effective relationship with our biggest customer.

A senior cabinet minister rejects this binary construction. “Of course we do not have to choose between the two positions,” they say. “It is up to us to define how we conduct ourselves plying mature diplomacy in our national interest.”

This is something Scott Morrison failed to do but which Albanese and Minister for Foreign Affairs Penny Wong are succeeding at. The restoration of $20 billion worth of trade with China is put forward as testimony to that effect.

Proof that our strategic relationship with the US is not “fraying”, as Joyce and others maintain, is the beginning in Queensland this weekend of the largest Exercise Talisman Sabre – a series of month-long land, sea and air manoeuvres between Australia, the US and 17 other nations. According to the Department of Defence, it is the biggest of the 11 biennial training exercises between the Australian Defence Force and the American military, “reflecting the closeness of our alliance”.

The Chinese offer of broader cooperation was made more enticing by President Trump announcing on Tuesday that he will impose a tariff of “like 200 per cent” on drug imports to the US. Treasurer Jim Chalmers describes the development as a “substantial concern” in light of the fact pharmaceuticals are our top export to the US after meat, valued at just over $6 billion last year, and gold.

Pharmaceuticals are particularly sensitive, because subsidised medicines through the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme are a sore point with US drug companies, who do not appreciate having the asking price for their products beaten down by the Australian government’s application of a buying monopoly. This is something Trump sees as a mark against us.

After hitting our steel and aluminium exports with a 50 per cent tariff, Trump has now added copper to the list. While America takes only 1 per cent of our sales of the metal worldwide, it is still worth about $50 million annually.

The impact of the Trump administration’s unpredictable disruption of world trade hit home on Tuesday when the new Monetary Policy Board of the Reserve Bank of Australia shocked markets by leaving interest rates on hold despite a weakening economy and inflation within the headline and underlying target band.

The board split 6-3 in favour of the decision, which, as the treasurer noted, hit “millions of Australians” who were “desperately hoping” for a rate cut. Chalmers said the decision came as a surprise to the market and almost every economist “who has expressed a view in recent days and weeks”.

Inside the government, some believe the decision was in fact unsurprising, coming as it did from a new board substantially made up of the monetary hardliners insisted on by the Coalition as the price for bipartisan support for Chalmers’ pre-election reforms.

The RBA governor, Michele Bullock, insists the direction is for further rate cuts, but considering the Trump-generated uncertainty, the majority of the board wanted more data before it made another cut.

Economist Stephen Koukoulas said the RBA was “sifting through the compost heap for snippets of information to support the ‘no cut’ decision, knowing it’s a risky strategy”. He says we’ll know in six months’ time whether it has further stalled a faltering economy.

Arguments over Australia’s direction were not confined to national security and the economy. There were also significant talks on cohesion after the firebombing of a synagogue in East Melbourne, anti-Semitic graffiti on buildings, and a violent protest at an Israeli restaurant in the Victorian capital.

The shadow attorney-general, Julian Leeser, himself Jewish, said life has been “so much more difficult” for the community since the Hamas attacks and abductions of Israeli men, women and children on October 7, 2023, and the Netanyahu government’s response in Gaza.

Some Jewish people believe it would help if community leaders here joined calls from former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert for an immediate end to the war and the release of all remaining hostages.

Trump’s attempts at brokering a ceasefire in Gaza, with a view to ending the war, would in this view certainly assist in lowering the temperature in Australia and around the world.

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke adopts a different approach to addressing anti-Semitism. Echoing the stance of Albanese, Burke believes overseas conflicts should not be imported into Australia. The miracle of postwar multicultural Australia is precisely due to old hatreds being left in Europe or the Middle East.

Burke flew to Melbourne last Sunday to show solidarity with the congregation of the East Melbourne Synagogue. Standing alongside the most senior Jewish member of parliament, Mark Dreyfus, Burke said Jewish Australians are “absolutely” part of the community in Australia and “hatred has no place in Australia; anti-Semitism has no place in Australia”.

Burke paid tribute to the role Dreyfus played as attorney-general in beefing up hate speech laws and securing $78 million in government funding for security around Jewish places of worship, schools and institutions. Burke said this paid for the closed-circuit television cameras that made possible an early arrest of the perpetrator, as well as the reinforced doors that stopped the fire from spreading.

Ley has called for Albanese to hold a national cabinet meeting to deal with what key Jewish leaders say should be declared a national emergency. He has said it’s not needed.

Leeser accuses the Albanese government of a failure of political leadership on the issue, which the prime minister rejects. Privately, senior Labor people see Leeser’s rhetoric as tawdry politics.

A senior government insider says the lesson of the federal election was that mainstream Australians reject outrage. The Dutton Liberals, encouraged by sections of the media, played the Middle Eastern conflict in a partisan and one-dimensional way and it got them nowhere.

Albanese says every time there has been a request from the Jewish community he has met it “expeditiously”, including appointing a special envoy on anti-semitism, Jillian Segal, whose comprehensive plan to combat bigotry he launched on Thursday with the commitment to implement it.

Sectarianism, of course, pre-dated the latest conflict in the Middle East. The essence of Australian mateship – of us all being china plates – is surely based on egalitarian respect for each other.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 11, 2025 as "Our old China mates".

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