China’s trade war on Australia was harmless so stop grovelling

As with most things Albo, he said one thing to get elected then did another in power.

During the Chinese economic coercion push against Australia before and after COVID, Albo consistently defended Beijing against Canberra.

However, a few months before the election he backflipped and said “China had changed”.

The moment he got elected he backflipped again and began Labor’s great grovel to Beijing to restore trade relations.

The kowtowing has been so daft and humiliating that it has been noticed as far away as Washington with some bewilderment.

Today we can add further texture to the great grovel with the release of a Productivity Commission report that shows how harmless the trade war was to the Australian economy:

Australian exports proved to be mostly resilient against these trade measures. For example, barley and coal exporters were successful in finding other markets. The value of beef and wheat exports to China did not experience significant falls – likely due to the partial nature of the measure, which was limited to certain abattoirs and shipments.

On the other hand, there were falls in exports of Australian lobsters and wine, affecting producers whose exports were concentrated on the Chinese market. That said, after initially increasing exports to their original markets, wine exporters developed new markets. In the case of products with limited perishability, like wine, the costs to exporters might be from deferred sales, rather than not being able to sell the good at all. And some exporters may have even enjoyed an increase in the value of stock that ages well. While these measures do not appear to have imposed substantial costs on the Australian economy as a whole, some businesses paid a heavy price.

…The effect of China’s trade measures on some Australian exporters could have had broader implications on the Australian and world economy after businesses, consumers, governments, workers and capital owners adjusted to changes in the trade environment. The Productivity Commission modelled the economy-wide effects of the trade measures. This section presents the results of this modelling.

The results indicate how trade adjusts to the disruptions and that although some industries might have incurred significant costs as they adjusted, economy-wide and global effects tend to be limited. Although the actual restrictions took many different forms (table C.1), they are modelled here as a tax imposed on Australian exports of the relevant goods to China; the tax is calibrated to increase the tax-inclusive export price to the point of making the export prohibitive. The model is designed to illustrate how Australian and global production and trade reorganised to adapt to the disruption.

The impact on growth was not a rounding error, as we said amid the wall-to-wall hysteria in the iMSM at the time.

Given China’s near-complete powerlessness, why is Albo face down licking Beijing’s boots instead of taking heed of the warning and building Australian economic resilience for the next round of Chinese warfare?