Ooh our PM is in China!

We are supposed to be cheering about this trip. It is going to bring about lots of lovely more trade opportunities. He is going to "repair" the relationship so "damaged" by the previous government. The Chinese are going to love us again. Really?

The first of our Prime Ministers to visit China was Whitlam. He was a man of the same political flavour as the present Prime Minister of course. He was Communist-Labor to the very core of his being. I met him more than once. The first time I met him was when his wife introduced me with the words, "This is Cat and be polite to her." Yes, he was that sort of man. He could be extremely rude to people he considered unimportant. 

I did not like him. The only good he ever did me was the very large sum of money his government spent on putting more books into all school libraries...and his wife Margaret was behind that move anyway. We talked about it. 

I asked her about the China visit and she was much less enthusiastic. It surprised me but I think she saw the dangers in cosying up to China more clearly than he did. Yes, we have done a lot of business with China. It could perhaps be said that places like the modern industrial Shanghai are built on the back of our mining exports but it is a lop-sided sort of affair. More than a quarter of our trade is directly connected with China and more occurs indirectly. It is our biggest trading partner and, should they decide we will no longer do business with them we will be in even worse financial straits than we are now. 

China dictates much of how we do business with the rest of the world and how we do it. This is an unpalatable fact and nobody in the current government or any previous government of that flavour appears to be willing to do anything about it. Why should they? We have a ready-made market. It may not be on the best possible trading terms but "it's the same for everyone". China is simply too powerful to ignore. 

This is the message we are now getting from our Prime Minister. He is making vague statements about the status quo on Taiwan and agreeing to trade deals in China's favour. He is offering tourist packages to wealthy Chinese as part of that. He might try negotiating the end of the lease on the port of Darwin but, whatever the outcome, it will not be in our favour. The same wealthy Chinese can still buy property here and send the dairy and meat products from the vast tracts of land back to China in increasingly one way trade. China is simply too big for us. We have no negotiating power when all they need to do is say "No, this is not how it will be done."

Under our present Prime Minister it can only get worse. He is too weak. He is not being "diplomatic". He is simply doing as they wish, He will come home saying the visit was a "success", that there have been some new opportunities. No, they are not new opportunities. They will simply be what his masters in Beijing have decided.

We desperately need to work on new markets. They will be small compared with China, very small but they could be grown over time. We need to start doing business with the rest of the world - if it is not too late.