What is “critical” for wineries in Australia is that they start looking for new markets instead of bleating for taxpayer help and a softening of diplomacy. Twenty years ago, China wasn’t even what could be called a “trading partner”, and everything was fine. The world is awash with wine and greed. The market is saturated, with every man and his dog trying to make a fast buck out of a commodity that is not essential to life and well being. The chooks have come home to roost.

There is nothing that can be done about China’s bullying. Get over it. Australia’s sovreignty and freedom is more important than the bank balances of a few greedy liquid drug producers.

I don’t touch the stuff, but if local prices for it are elevated like lobster prices and other commodities in order to sell it cheaper overseas, tough titty if the market is lost.

Greg Bondar asks the question, "to what extent can we blame the Australian government for failing to 'engage' with China properly' considering COVID-19?"

He then helpfully answers his own question putting the blame (surprise, surprise) on his own country.

"The answer seems to be in the fact that the export threat came after Australia led international calls for an investigation into the origins of the coronavirus which is just one of a long list of diplomatic tit-for-tat points with China."

I don't exactly know where this fashion for blaming your own country for everything came from, I think it just became a political fashion among a certain class of people desperate to adopt attitudes and vales that would delineate a clear social distinction from the "lower" classes and the middle classes.
Of course, anybody with a triple digit IQ knows that Greg Bondar's analysis is quixotic and bizarre.

Reality check, Greg.

China is not a socialist country, it is a fascist country. The CCP has 80 billionaires as members so how they can even call themselves a "communist" Party is a standing joke. There is only one villain here and it is not your country. It is the Chinese Fascist Party which seems to have declared war on the entire world. It has peed of the Danes, the Swedes, the Indians, the Americans, the British, the French, the Argentinians and Brazilians (by illegally fishing in their waters), and just about every other country on planet earth, when it deliberately, with malice and aforethought, released the Kung Flue plague on the entire world.

Please find a dark corner and think things through. Australia, your country, is a decent country respected throughout the world. China is becoming a real threat to world peace and it is a screaming nightmare right out of 1984 with facial recognition cameras everywhere and a "social credit system" controlled by supercomputers.

Australia good, China bad. Got it now, Greg? Have a cup of tea, a Bex and a good lie down. I am sure you can manage simple logic if you try.

Might even allow locals to enjoy overpriced wines at reasonable prices.

I've argued for years that we've become far too reliant on China> For years and years! And as always, fell on the deaf ears of quislings who only ever saw dollar sings and the catching, cathing of the cash register to the exclusion of all else including the national interest and suppressed patriotism.

These are long feared pigeons coming o roost! Suck it up, you were warned a thousand times.

We have alternatives for all we make, grow, mine or produce. And there other markets and other things to grow beside a grape glut! We don't need China, we just need a few politicians to grow backbones and take the self-limiting ideological blinkers off!

We need to develop a nuclear power industry, MSR thorium and MSR that can be tasked to burn nuclear waste. Waste other nations will pay annual billions to us to take from their hands! All been said before, a thousand times!

Beter than firing endless blanks at a nation that just doesn't listen anymore than your average Aussie Polly! Who usual are famous for putting every else ahead of the national interest or our long term future/prosperity!

You've had the road map for years! But allowed vested interest and greed to dominate! We need some big projects and the testicular fortitude to begin to actually build them!

Insanity is doing what you've always done while expecting a different result!
Alan B.

From my limited experience it is possible to buy a perfectly good Australian wine for less than $10 a bottle. It is only the snob value that makes people pay over $20 for Penfolds plonk.
David

Correction I wrote catching, which should be read as cat-ching, cat-ching of the cash register.
Alan B.

agree with ttbn.

Get over it, find new markets.

@ateday

Very true Amigo.

All those great Reds that WERE going to Red China

should be sold cut-price to OLO readers, pronto!

Pete

China is not a socialist country, it is a fascist country.
LEGO,
China is doing what the West would like to do but isn't smart enough to !

Mr. Gondar,
An economist is a liberal. It has perhaps a great deal to do with the very liberal view of the world because the fundamental presupposition of economics is homo economics. But China is not playing an economic game, which game is more invisible and harder to understand for those of us who are so trained as to see human and social affairs exclusively in terms of economics.

In a nutshell, China had been an autarkical society. But it lives in a very different environment, no longer able to live in self-sustenance and self-subsistence. It gets much prosperity from a free international trading system, but the problem is that it turns its economic wealth, in stead of being a status quo member, into political power for bringing the world under the principle of its traditional world-view or Tianxia.

French pork raising industry is losing competitive edge to Chinese one. A middle-aged woman said she would buy French pork though she had to pay extra. What is wanted now is the international version of "I will buy French pork."