Beazley takes aim at China trade deal
Sydney Morning Herald
Beazley takes aim at China trade deal
John Garnaut, Economics Correspondent
15 August 2006
Labor leader Kim Beazley has accused a China-based Australian of growing rich on Australian intellectual property and wants the Government to slowly ditch trade negotiations with China.
Mr Beazley also revealed a preference for a unified national industrial relations system, provided it was achieved by co-operation with the states rather than coercion.
He told an Australian Industry Group conference in Canberra a Chinese businessman was guilty of exploiting Australian intellectual property.
"I think the most scandalous result for Australian industry in recent times has been the fact that China has been using our solar hot-water systems after we invented the damn things and that China’s richest man grows rich off Australian IP."
He was referring to Zhengrong Shi, an Australian citizen listed by Forbes magazine as mainland China’s richest citizen, worth $2.9 billion.
And Mr Beazley was sceptical that benefits from any bilateral trade deal with China would outweigh costs to local manufacturing.
"You want to be absolutely certain that there are definite gains," he said.
Mr Beazley said negotiations with China should "hasten slowly", and ultimately go nowhere.
"You work at it very, very slowly and you wouldn’t want to try and press it to a conclusion," he said. "The thing that worries me about [Trade Minister Mark] Vaile and the Nationals running trade policy ... they know in their heart of hearts they really only care about agriculture."
Mr Beazley said he was generally "not big" on bilateral free trade agreements, saying the term was a euphemism for "preferential trade".
He said he had supported the US trade deal for strategic reasons because "to spurn that hand would be foolish".
On industrial relations, Mr Beazley faces a showdown with NSW right-wing unions if he endorses a national regime.
In answer to a question yesterday, Mr Beazley played it down as "a second order issue". But he advocated harmony and rationalisation.
"What we have seen is that the different ranks of the system must be better harmonised and we don’t want to see that resolved by dictat," he said.
"There will be no attempt on our part to override the states but we will be looking constantly for opportunities to rationalise between the two."
