Dammed if you do, dammed if you don't.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott in Parliament today will call for the China Free Trade Agreement to be endorsed or the time limit will expire. The opposition want this blocked calling for more employment safeguards. Both present complex positions.

Reducing the arguments to basic premises, on the one hand the China agreement has been under negotiation since the Howard years and acknowledges that China is Australia’s major trading partner. There are major benefits in signing the agreement in relation to trade and this will indirectly open up more jobs. Failing to endorse the agreement will almost certainly cause it to be taken off the table as the Chinese feel they have been slighted at the end of this game and will take their ball and go home. Based on past experience with Chinese business practices, if their leaders have their noses out of joint they usually retaliate in some unpleasant way so it will not just be losing benefits of free trade but something much worse. So you are dammed if you don’t.

On the other hand Bill Shorten’s reservations on protecting jobs and what may be in the fine print no one is really sure about needs to be examined. Labor assert that if the agreement is signed China will flood Australia with new projects staffed not by Australians but by thousands of Chinese imported workers. They postulate that 457 visas will be abused and the flood gates will be open. Obviously the Liberal coalition say this won’t happen. The reality based on what has happened in other parts of the world and the history of 457 Visas should offer some glimpse of the future. 

According to a resent World Bank consultant returning from several jobs in Africa, the plane from Bangkok to Nairobi he said was 95% Chinese workers resplendid in their uniforms going off all over the continent to work on Chinese projects. The argument is that this could not happen in Australia. The reality is that 457 Visas have been used beyond their initial intention and it has not been difficult to bypass the intended safeguards. Say for example under the new agreement the Chinese want to invest in a major electric supply company. Presumably they need high qualified engineers and perhaps managers to guide the project; they only speak Chinese (Mandarin). But you need 200-500 labourers to build the plant and you need to have these able to understand the engineers and the managers who only speak Chinese: logical. So you apply for and are granted 200-500 457 Visas. This is only an extension of the argument which has been successfully applied for years.

So does it matter? Some of those Chinese imports will eventually go back to China but many will work out some way to remain. Shorten’s issue of their having taken Australian jobs then is only half right. In fact on 457 visas they would have taken jobs which COULD have been given to Australians but without the Chinese investment there would not have been jobs anyway. So you are dammed if you do.

As with most things in politics, like an iceberg, what you see above the surface leaves a lot unseen down below. The jobs or no jobs argument is like a fog to distract what is in the fine print. The Chinese are not known for their benevolence and even without reading the agreement one knows that Australia has had to make major concessions. Australia needs China not the other way around. And the fine print is all about access to land purchases and the right to ownership where the intention is for China to own the means of production with which it can feed its ever expanding population just as Indonesia is buying up cattle stations to bypass Australian supply. Reading the tea leaves would suggest that Australia gets squeezed no matter what it does in relation to the Free Trade Agreement and you’re dammed if you do and dammed if you don’t.