An election, an anniversary and the Shangri-La. This is how Penny Wong came to visit Beijing.
Chinese customs agents had given verbal instructions to stop importing a string of Australian products including wine, barley, beef, lobster, coal, timber and copper.
“We also need to acknowledge that China has been a nation in which we have a friendly relationship and have had one since 1972,” Albanese said in comments first reported by Elena Collinson and James Curran“That is part of Labor’s legacy, we will work with the region.” “So we started to rub up more against each other including in our immediate neighbourhood,” he said last week. “We found that our respective interests and agendas didn’t always match up well, and this needed attention.“The more that we had to do with each other, the more things could not be ignored, and the more we had things to say. As China sought to assert itself, Australia found a need to address potential vulnerabilities and to better define parameters for activity in our community.
When communication between Chinese officials in Canberra and the Department of Foreign Affairs completely broke down, China resorted to using the media, culminating in the 14 grievances issued by Beijing in a Canberra hotel in November 2020. Chinese ministers and state media had noticed the shift in tone and began enthusing about the prospect of a Labor victory. Wong and Albanese’s initial political concerns were realised in February the next year when Morrison labelled deputy Labor leader Richard Marles “a Manchurian candidate” for the Chinese Communist Party in parliament.
Albanese and Wong have re-established contact without giving up any of the substantive issues in the relationship but neither have there been any major breakthroughs yet. The Coalition, though occasionally misstepping in its rhetoric, did deliver what it set out to achieve: a new landing pad for Australia-China relations that means Beijing will no longer be surprised when Australia talks about human rights or implements national security decisions.
Pre-election, Albanese modelled Canberra’s approach on the Biden administration by speaking about “competition without catastrophe”. By this year that had transformed into Wong’s Australian formula of “cooperate where we can, disagree where we must, and engage in our national interest”. In Beijing bottle shops few Australian wines remain. Most that are will be leftover from the once $1.1 billion strong market and have been stuck in shops for the past three years. Only a few new deliveries now make it through, including a brand endorsed by former Australian ambassador Geoff Raby, a prominent critic of the Coalition government’s policy, which was largely spared the tariffs put on other winemakers.
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