Hansonite protest out of left field
The Australian, Canberra
Hansonite protest out of left field
By Malcolm Colless
22 September 2009
Signs of community concern over Chinese influence on Australian living standards are shaping up as a key domestic issue for the Rudd government as it struggles to mend its already strained relations with China.
Home buyers in Melbourne, for example, are complaining that they are being frozen out of a tight housing market by Chinese purchasers who have no intention of living in their new properties.
The influx of Chinese money on to the Australian housing market follows a relaxation by the federal government last March of its rules on foreign companies and temporary residents.
Liberal Party officials say uncertainty about this and the effect of Chinese investment in Australian industries are surfacing during the process for preselecting candidates for the next federal election, particularly in Victoria.
This coincides with the launch last week of a campaign by the left-wing Victorian branch of the Electrical Trades Union against Australia signing a free trade agreement with China. The cornerstone argument by the union is that a free trade deal will destroy thousands of Australian manufacturing industry jobs.
The campaign launch by the secretary of the union, Dean Mighell, had the support of three lower house independents, Bob Katter, Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, who argued that the government should give the parliament a bigger role in evaluating the merits of free trade deals.
What was not revealed at the low-key affair in the Parliament House coffee shop was that controversial Nationals Senate leader Barnaby Joyce had originally agreed to launch the campaign but had taken to his sick bed in Queensland with bronchial pneumonia.
Joyce was an outspoken critic of the Chinalco-Rio takeover proposal and his involvement in this latest campaign throws up challenges to his party leader, Warren Truss, who is opposition trade spokesman, and Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull because the FTA negotiations with China were initiated by the Howard government.
Joyce, who is regarded by many as the de facto head of the Nationals, has already crossed swords with Turnbull over the Coalition’s response to the government’s emissions trading scheme.
Further tensions are likely to speed up a split within the Coalition that seems inevitable anyway by the end of the year.
Ironically, while the Australian government has been trying to push the FTA negotiations along, the Chinese have been dragging their heels with the 14th round of discussions yet to be scheduled. But what is certain to antagonise the Chinese if the ETU campaign gains traction is that in arguing against concluding the FTA it savagely attacks China’s employment standards and its record on human rights.
Mighell says a union-commissioned report on the FTA, titled The China Advantage, is aimed at sparking public debate on its effect on the livelihood of Australians. It has sent the report to other unions across the country seeking support and has established a "save Aussie jobs" website to drive the campaign.
"Astonishingly, there is currently very little public debate," Mighell says. "It is a social-justice matter that all Australians should be concerned about." He says the dangers posed by the FTA would not only be a threat to jobs "but also (affect) the employability of our children".
To broaden the political base of the campaign the union commissioned the FTA report from a conservative consultancy, CPI Strategic, headed by Rick Brown, a former adviser to Howard government ministers Kevin Andrews and Nick Minchin. The report criticises China’s lack of labour rights and poor enforcement of regulations in relation to child labour, occupational health and safety and environmental protection, which it says gives the country a disturbing trade advantage, particularly in relation to manufacturing.
All this comes against a backdrop of increasing criticism of the Rudd administration by the government-owned Chinese media, particularly over its response to issues such as the detention of Rio Tinto executive Stern Hu and protests by Chinese Muslim Uighurs.
That the ETU campaign is not endorsed by the Rudd government nor involves Labor MPs (yet, anyway) may not be enough to satisfy the Chinese in the present diplomatic environment.
So it would not be surprising for them to expect a public rejection of the campaign by Kevin Rudd in the interests of closer trade co-operation. But the dilemma for the Prime Minister is how to finesse this without exacerbating the issue and potentially triggering a One Nation-type domestic backlash in Australia.
