A meeting between the Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, and China’s president Xi Jinping could lead to “some freeing up of current trading blockages”, the trade minister has said.
Australia is looking for “off-ramps” from World Trade Organisation (WTO) disputes, Don Farrell said on Monday in a further sign of possible compromise with China.
Farrell made the comments in a speech to the Australian Apec Study Centre, raising hopes Albanese’s meeting with Xi this week could ease the trade dispute between the two countries.
Albanese confirmed on Monday evening he would meet with Xi at the G20 summit in Bali on Tuesday afternoon.
“We enter this discussion with goodwill. There are no preconditions on this discussion. I’m looking forward to having constructive dialogue,” the prime minister said when arriving in Bali.
Australia has complained about China’s sanctions against a range of exports including meat, crayfish, timber and coal and is pursuing trade disputes in the WTO over anti-dumping tariffs on Australian wine and barley.
Since the Labor government was elected in May, Australia and China have reopened communication with ministerial meetings between their foreign and defence ministers.
On Sunday, Albanese met the Chinese premier, Li Keqiang, at a gala dinner in Cambodia, the first leader-to-leader dialogue between the two countries since 2019.
Chinese state media Xinhua reported Li had acknowledged difficulties in the relationship but said in the meeting China was prepared to meet Australia “halfway”.
According to Xinhua, Li told Albanese that “taking office as the prime minister of the new Labor government, you expressed Australia’s readiness to work with China to bring the bilateral relationship back on track”.
“China is ready to meet Australia halfway, and work with Australia to seize the opportunity of the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations to promote sustained, sound and steady growth of China-Australia relations,” Li reportedly said.
On Monday, Farrell warned that “great power rivalry is undermining the international rules-based order”.
“It is no longer possible – if it ever was – to insulate our trade policy from geopolitics,” he said.
“Attempts at economic coercion and unfair targeting of Australian goods in recent years have demonstrated the risks to our economy when the rules of the road are ignored. Increasingly, economic policy and national security policy are intertwined – a resilient Australian economy underpins national security.”
Asked if Australia would ever restrict exports to achieve national security outcomes, Farrell said Australia doesn’t “have plans to do that at the moment”.
“In fact, we’re hoping that discussions between our prime minister and the president of China results in some freeing up of current trading blockages. As with any WTO dispute, we’re open to discussing possible off-ramps that result in a mutually agreed solution.”
Farrell later tempered expectations, telling ABC TV the Australian government was not “expecting things to change overnight but we want them heading in the right direction”.
Earlier, Farrell said Australia had learned after the past 10 years that if you “put all of your eggs in the one basket, so that you have one major trading partner, if problems arise with that partner as they have done between our relationship with China … you find yourselves in a very difficult situation”.
Farrell said Australia was looking to stabilise its relationship with other trading nations while continuing to “prosecute the case for our national interests” and raise issues including human rights.
In his speech, Farrell also confirmed that Labor wouldn’t include investor-state dispute mechanisms in future trade agreements, and would review the use of ISDS clauses in existing deals.
In July, Farrell said he would seek a “compromise situation” or “alternative way” to settle trade disputes that might emerge in talks with China, comments that drew criticism from the Coalition opposition.
Ahead of his trip to the G20, Albanese called on China to lift its economic sanctions that are costing Australia $20bn a year, arguing they were “not in the interests of China” and needed to be scrapped to “normalise” the relationship.
