It’s been a refreshing, fascinating and forceful division of opinion: Australian billionaires Kerry Stokes and Andrew Forrest talking their China-reliant books on the one hand and Canberra’s hawkish apparatus demanding accountability for COVID-19’s Chinese origins on the other – all ignited by Andrew Forrest’s impertinent hijacking of a joint presser with Health Minister Greg Hunt in Melbourne last week.

Also last week, Stokes used the front page of his own The West Australian to urge Scott Morrison not to “poke our biggest provider of income in the eye”. Subtle it was not.