Mark
Much comment has been made about the mishandling of the COVID-19 outbreak by China and rightly so. It needs to be made crystal clear that our beef is absolutely not with the people of China. It is with the leadership of China.
The people of China are suffering even worse authoritarian conditions than almost anywhere else in the world even before COVID-19 and in many cases, they are fed up with their own government. Those few who do dare to speak out about it do so at their peril.
There are, of course, those who benefit from trade with China who will fight criticism of China’s leadership tooth and nail. The nominal methods they will choose are the classic propaganda allegations of racism and xenophobia.
We don’t blame Australia for Brendan Tarrant. We know he was nuts and that he represented nobody but himself and a few online nutters that day. The correct person to blame is likely the cop who may have been busting for the loo amongst a pile of paperwork when he thought “she’ll be right” and clicked “approve” on Tarrant’s firearms licence application.
We don’t blame the Chinese people for the actions of their government. The quality of democracy over there means it is pretty much outside of their control. There will be a few idiots who will yell something offensive at a Chinese person whilst driving by, and a few shysters who will try to link us with those idiots. These are both wrong, should not happen, and should be condemned in the strongest possible terms.
What we need right now is an honest, realistic conversation about the risks versus the benefits of trade with China and what an exit strategy might be.
We need to accept that China will likely throw their toys at even a hint of their international influence being threatened and respond with doing everything possible to damage our economy by cutting off trade sharply to try to bully us into accepting their demands.
The outcome may be that it is better for New Zealand long term to look away from trade with China. If the US is concerned about Chinese influence, maybe they should give us market access to replace trade with China so we can do something about that influence without shooting our economy in the foot. (As if China leaking COVID-19 to the world hasn’t forced us to do that already under duress of mass unemployment homelessness and starvation!)
If we did these deals secretly behind closed doors so we can one day stand up to China without consequences as we can start trading with the US immediately, that would serve the Chinese government right considering some of their underhand tactics.
We also need an honest and realistic conversation about how much immigration we can actually cope with without saturating the housing and labour markets and overloading our infrastructure. Not because we hate immigrants, we don’t. They are suffering too. Even if they are making more money than they ever had in their lives when they came from, they are having to pay more then they have ever had to pay in their lives for the basics.
Again, those who benefit from saturating the housing and labour markets with immigrants fight this discussion tooth and nail by calling us racists, xenophobes and right-wing extremists, blah blah blah.
In the meantime, immigrants will suffer from tough conditions just as locals do, China will continue to beat us with ultra-low labour costs and put Kiwis and Kiwi immigrants out of work and wealthy importers, property investors and production magnates will laugh all the way to the bank with their concierge politicians and journalists in tow.
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