How China pilfered Australia’s medical supplies

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While the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was lying to the world about the severity of the coronavirus and punishing whistle blowers, it was also demanding nations keep borders open and pilfering the world’s medical supplies.

The above segment, aired over the weekend by 60 Minutes Australia, features a whistle blower working in Sydney at Chinese real estate developer Poly Developments and Holdings. The whistle blower explains how staff were instructed by the company to urgently find masks and medical supplies anywhere they could, including from pharmacies across Sydney.

The whistle blower said he saw tonnes of gloves, masks, gowns, sanitiser and other vital medical supplies being packaged in his Sydney office to be sent to China:

“Meeting rooms, lunch rooms and the boardroom, starting to be filled with different types of items getting unpackaged and repackaged and labelled,” he said.

“It definitely rose my suspicion. The concern to me is if all these medical items leave the country, what’s left for us?”.

“It is very unsettling that essential equipment can just leave our borders in massive commercial quantities”.

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Other Chinese real estate companies operating in Australia did likewise, including Greenland Group and Risland.

Then the CCP requisitioned foreign-owned medical supply factories in China, thus ensuring they could no longer supply the world.

For its part, Health Minister Greg Hunt stood by passively and allowed the pilfering of Australian medical supplies to happen, claiming we had an adequate stockpile of masks and protective wear.

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Worse, the Morrison Government only banned the non-commercial export of PPE such as face masks, hand sanitiser, gloves and gowns last week.

The end result is that Australia’s front-line medical staff are now dangerously short of protective wear, placing them at grave risk of contracting the coronavirus.

What a mess.

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About the author
Leith van Onselen is Chief Economist at the MB Fund and MB Super. He is also a co-founder of MacroBusiness. Leith has previously worked at the Australian Treasury, Victorian Treasury and Goldman Sachs.