Brisbane got lots of global attention by hosting the G20 leaders summit last weekend because so many participants queued up behind Canada’s Stephen Harper to disparage Russian President Vladimir Putin for the Kremlin’s malignant actions in Ukraine.
Less than 24 hours later in Canberra, the Australian capital, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Australia’s prime minister, Tony Abbott, signed China’s biggest trade deal ever. Abbott followed that triumph by announcing a strategic security alliance with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and, perhaps rashly, promised that a trade deal with New Delhi could be expected by the end of next year.
As Australia’s daily Financial Review crowed: “Simultaneous visits by Xi and Modi mark us as no longer an appendix to Asia, but as a core Indo-Pacific power.”
The optics must have looked good to the 2.6 billion people back home in China and India, too. Xi and Modi were accorded rapturous welcomes when they addressed Australia’s parliament on back-to-back days.
Xi talked about how it was best to achieve peace through trade. Modi spoke of the bonds that Indians and Australians share. Both countries are democracies, he said, and their citizens love cricket.
Neither man mentioned climate change, which is a sore spot with Abbott, particularly after he was hectored as being a laggard on the subject by U.S. President Barack Obama during the Brisbane gathering.
Modi repeated last month’s superstar turn in New York, drawing a crowd of about 20,000 enthralled Indo-Australians to a Bollywoodesque rally at an arena in Sydney. The Hindu nationalist then spent an evening in Melbourne with Australia’s business elite where he kicked open “closed-door” protectionist policies that have endured since India’s beginnings in 1947 by urging his hosts to invest billions of dollars in his country.
For his part, Xi, who has quickly demonstrated that he is the most outgoing Chinese communist leader of all time, underscored his keen breadth of interest in this continent by spending a day with his wife touring tiny Tasmania, which, until this week, was the only state he had never visited.
The scope of the trade deal with Beijing is breathtaking and projected to be worth about $18 billion.
Australia’s trade with China already dwarfs that of the U.S. and Canada. About 33 per cent of Australia’s exports — much of them natural resources such as iron ore and coal — already go to China while about 20 per cent of its imports come from there. About 800,000 Chinese tourists are to travel to Australia this year, which is about a 90 per cent increase in five years.
Among the things that Australia wanted and got from China was the kind of currency swap hub that Beijing and Ottawa agreed to 10 days ago, as well as tariff-free access for Australian seafood, wine and dairy products and a smoother path for professionals, like health-care providers, to work in China.
There was giddy, probably exaggerated talk that as many as one million head of Aussie cattle annually will be headed to China where a rapidly growing middle class wants to eat a lot more beef.
The potential bonanza does not come without some risk. Australia will become more susceptible to the economic and political twists and turns that rend China. Beijing has also sometimes tried to have agreements rewritten or reinterpreted once a partner becomes dependent on the deal.
The trade deal with China was light on detail but the fretting in some quarters has already begun. This is because it seems the accord will allow for the import of Chinese construction workers to help build projects where the investment exceeds $150 million.
China’s point of view is that its workers can complete the projects faster with the result that the profits could flow faster to each country. But Australia’s still relatively strong trade unionist movement shouted that this could freeze Australian workers out of the country’s big building spree.
The new arrangements between Australia and China are entirely commercial. The deal with India may ultimately be of greater significance.
Somewhat paradoxically, given the vows of solidarity and affection expressed by Abbott when he was palling around with Xi, Australia and India announced only hours after Xi left for home that they were forging an alliance that would rein in China’s military ambitions in the region, particularly on the high seas. The formal process would begin sometime in 2015 with joint naval exercises.
“Today, the world sees Australia to be at the heart of the Asia-Pacific and the Indian Ocean region,” Modi told the Australian parliament. “This dynamic region holds the key to this world’s future as Australia is at the crossroads.”
By trying to dance with China and India simultaneously, the Abbott government is giving Australia options. That the U.S. was not mentioned at all by Abbott, Xi or Modi tells its own story about the 21st century.
Original Article
Source: canada.com/
Author: Matthew Fisher
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