Ed Gannon: China is playing games with barley tariff as Australia stands firm on inquiry
China’s nonsense about Australian barley growers being subsidised by the Federal Government has been bubbling for 18 months, but they chose to pull the tariff trigger now to punish our nation for standing up, writes Ed Gannon.
Opinion
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I’m not big on poetry. And I am probably even less so on economic theory. But the two came together last week in a way that made a hell of a lot of sense.
I joined an online conference run by agriculture company Alltech, where Irish economist David McWilliams kicked off his presentation by reading a WB Yeats poem The Second Coming.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
This poem was published in 1920, and written at the time of the Spanish flu. As McWilliams said, the centre Yeats referred to was everything we know and hold dear — our everyday lives. The final lines say that bad things happen when the good guys do nothing, and the bad guys step up and fill the void. You can see that happening in this pandemic.
Scott Morrison teetered on doing nothing, but thankfully others, who did have conviction, convinced him to embark on our current course. He and the state premiers have done a remarkable job keeping the virus at bay. To think that as cases globally hit daily highs, states here bicker over whether residents of one state with four new cases could travel to a neighbouring state that has one new case.
But there are bigger, more sinister examples. I look to the US and China. Witness the passionate intensity of those in the US recklessly demanding businesses reopen and lockdown rules be scrapped, even as the virus kills thousands in that country each day. All in the name of adhering to a constitution that appears even more absurd to the outside world.
China’s actions have been nothing short of despicable. Covering up, blaming others, then lashing out at those who — quite rightly — ask that an independent investigation be undertaken into the origins of COVID-19.
China had been cooking up its bogus case that Australian barley growers were being subsidised by the Federal Government for 18 months. Sure, farmers get drought assistance, but that is at a time when none are growing barley.
But China pulled the trigger on the barley tariff to punish naughty Australia for having the temerity to call for an inquiry. It is important the good guys with conviction stand up, for the bad guys who want the world to suffer will fill the void.
ED GANNON IS THE WEEKLY TIMES EDITOR