But why? Because of “groveling” by the Australian government? A Reuters story simply reports the fact that according to the prime minister of Australia, Anthony Albanese, China has agreed “to lift ban on Australian lobster imports by year-end” (October 10, 2024). The schedule was determined by Albanese and Chinese Premier Li Qiang “on the sidelines of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations meeting in Laos.”
China had imposed bans and tariffs on a slew of Australian goods in 2020 “after years of tensions.” The restriction on lobster is the only one that hadn’t yet been removed.
Tensions went up, now they’re down.
Another Reuters story sketches more of the background, including Australia’s ban on foreign political donations in 2017, its ban on Huawei broadband tech in 2018, and its support for an investigation of the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. This reprehensible curiosity about the reasons for the pandemic was apparently the straw that broke the camel’s back and motivated China’s curtailing of trade with Australia as well as other anti-Australian moves.
In a Sky News interview with Lincoln Parker, a national security analyst, Parker suggests that the explanation of the renewed trade is the three years of groveling by the prime minister, who ascended to his post in May 2022.
“It’s taken three years of Prime Minister Albanese groveling to the Chinese Communist Party and overlooking everything they’ve done. And there is a long list of atrocities…. They’ve attacked RAF, Australian Air Force, pilots. They’ve attacked Philippine vessels almost every week…. But Prime Minister Albanese says nothing about this when they’re our partners…. So that we can sell [China] more lobsters.”
But the Albanese administration’s manner of dealing with China was only one of Parker’s examples of Australia’s decrepit foreign policy “or lack thereof.”
