World needs Donald Trump to stand up to Beijing

Relying on Donald Trump may be dicey, but it is the only game in town. Picture: AP

While writing this column, I was watching question time in federal parliament. The coronavirus totally dominated discussions. I am not sick from the virus but I am sick of talking about the virus. Thankfully, as the number of victims falls, it seems possible that within a few months the buzz surrounding it will fade and journalists won’t feel a desperate need to write about it and radio and television hosts will feel similarly compelled as well.

Josh Frydenberg is talking about a hit to the economy of $320bn. A massive hit like that will affect each and every one of us in the way we live and play. Almost 600,000 jobs were lost last month and the carnage is not over yet. It is difficult to erase the sight of long queues at Centrelink offices stretching for up to a kilometre. The lucky ones sit on old milk crates. The rest have only shank’s pony to fall back on.

As the smoke clears from this crisis, our chronically weak manufacturing sector has an opportunity to rethink what it makes. Manufacturing has to look for niche markets. When we venture into big labour-intensive industries we inevitably fail. While we still have aluminium smelters, we find it hard to ensure uninterrupted, cheap power to them. While we have made a comeback in the production of steel, Newcastle’s massive mills are silent reminders of better days.

Lining up for the dole is dispiriting and disempowering for most people. Sadly, where unemployment benefits have sustained some families for years, the work ethic is lost. If you grow up in a home where everyone sleeps in and eats breakfast at the same time as most people begin work or later, your chances of getting a job are greatly diminished.

Gough Whitlam made it possible for kids from impoverished backgrounds to get to university, but it was largely middle-class kids who took advantage of his reforms. The dream of kids from the poorest families going to university remains just that — a dream. No one should be content to stay on the bottom rung of the ladder but many seem reluctant to move onward and upward. There are way too many on the bottom rungs at the moment with 1.6 million Australians receiving JobSeeker payments.

All powerful governments are being brought to their knees by this bug. Atom bombs and thermonuclear weapons are not much use in this fight. It is the size and strength of a nation’s health system that matters at the moment, not the size of its arsenal.

Sweden has had 27,000 infections and 3000 deaths from the virus, and it allowed restaurants and bars to stay open. It appears to me that we may have erred on the side of caution but, in a crisis of this dimension, caution is righteous. “Bull at the gate” reactions could have been dangerous. Australian governments have set a high standard for the world to follow. We are accustomed to following doctors’ orders and there is no doubt this has served us well. Caution beat recklessness, as it usually does. As our health improves the focus will change, too. We will get back to focusing on what is left of the economy.

For all the purists who complain about our economy not being balanced, it is still a fact that what we dig up and ship away continues to sustain us.

The search for the country with the perfect economy has always been forlorn or fruitless. In the early 1980s, members and senators from both sides of politics looked to Japan as the economic mecca, unaware the bloated property values used to suggest wealth were a house of cards guaranteed to fall over. Reverberations from that collapse hung around the Japanese economy for a very long time.

If the rest of the world is supposed to stand up to China, there must be an assumption that many world leaders are, to use the well-known Paul Keating phrase, “crazy brave”. The Chinese neither forgive nor forget and they have long memories. They believe they cannot let an insult go unpunished. Still, they must acknowledge that the virus had its origin on its territory and vastly inadequate measures were taken by the Chinese when its existence first became known.

While China might be a mighty economic and military force, it should be wary about provoking the rest of the world. Eventually, every nation with which China trades will be provoked into diversifying their export and import trade. If China continues to act like the bully on the block, the alienation of too many trading partners will continue apace.

When Whitlam was the trailblazer in visiting China, Australia won many Chinese hearts. For many years that worked in our favour. We would be forgiven the odd indiscretion.

Now the game has changed. The Chinese are attempting to silence voices of disapproval even in the diaspora. If someone of Chinese heritage dare criticises the regime, a relative back home will have life made more uncomfortable. The Chinese government has a particularly long reach and is not beyond threats of violence and intimidation.

The world needs Donald Trump, the only person in a position to stand up to China, to do exactly that. He must discard his isolationist tendency. Relying on Trump may be dicey, but it is the only game in town.