Morrison government started China trade ‘war’: Fitzgibbon

Joel Fitzgibbon lashed Scott Morrison and Malcolm Turnbull’s language for failing to ease tensions with China while the US benefits.

Agriculture Minister David Littleproud, left, and his Labor counterpart Joel Fitzgibbon in Canberra. Picture: Sean Davey

Outspoken Labor frontbencher Joel Fitzgibbon has accused the Coalition of starting a “war” with China and warned the better trading relationship with the US was “going okay at Australia’s expense”.

The opposition’s agriculture and resources spokesman, who has been a regular critic of the government’s handling of the relationship with China, claimed there was no attempt at conciliation and lashed Scott Morrison’s and former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s language on the Asian superpower.

His attack came as Agriculture Minister David Littleproud said he had attempted to reach out to his Chinese counterpart on two occasions – as recently as August – after China imposed tariffs on Australian beef and barley in the wake of the Prime Minister’s call for an independent probe into the origins of the coronavirus.

Joel Fitzgibbon. Picture: Milan Scepanovic

Mr Fitzgibbon referenced the government “starting a war with China” at the National Press Club in Canberra while discussing the importance of diversification for the agriculture sector. He later called it an “economic war”.

“Are members of the government telling me they only started thinking about diversifying our markets when they started a war with China? No,” he said.

“We are an outlier in this debate. We’ve had barley switched off, red meat switched off, threats on wine, probably more trouble to come there, we’ve got threats to turn off our steaming coal … The Australia-China relationship has fallen to a point never seen since Tiananmen Square, probably worse than that.

“Go back to Malcolm Turnbull and some of the language he used from time-to-time, look at the changes to the Foreign Investment Review Board threshold, which discriminated against China.

“We didn’t talk about China in the (defence) white paper about 10 or 11 years ago but you’ll see the Prime Minister’s now regularly in the courtyard, the Prime Minister’s office, talking critically about China and its behaviour.”

While Mr Fitzgibbon acknowledged there were tensions between China and other countries “all the time”, he did not lay any blame on the country for the divisions with Australia.

“Go and ask (US President) Donald Trump how his trade relationship is going? He’ll say it’s going okay and it is. To some extent it’s going okay at Australia’s expense,” he said.

“How do we normalise this relationship when people can’t even talk to one another? We need to get this relationship back on track. Yep, always diversify but gee you’re going to have to find a very big new market or an aggregate of new markets to offset what we send to China.”

Mr Littleproud said the business-to-business relationships in Australia and China were continuing “in a calm and methodical way”.

“We’ll ring them up and say ‘we’re here to talk, we’ll wait’, that’s what good friends do. They’ll have disagreements at times and we respect that but you’ve got to be prepared to have your hand out and re-engage,” he said.

“(Trade Minister) Simon Birmingham and I have both got our hands out ready to engage.”

Mr Morrison said in June Australia had “done nothing to injure” its partnership with China and had acted in the national interest.