“The proposition from Beijing is very simple. If you want to go ahead and make policies according to your own national interests, and not ours, we will cut your income. Specifically, China’s official representative to Australia threatened boycotts of four Australian industries’ sales to China: those of the wine, beef, tourism and education sectors.

Sovereignty or money. Simple. What’s Australia’s choice?” Hartcher

If this inquiry was based on genuine  medical and scientific grounds then Hartcher might have an argument but it’s not and what he calls China’s “talking points” are as valid as those he aims at it. It’s this politicized Cold War bullshit and our American aping that led us to Korea Vietnam Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Our assistance in the slaughter of a million Indonesians. Black and white choices like this are better understood by asking why are we so eager to be a developing American colony  in the Pacific? We are afterall an American military base.

Put in context  how many wars have we entered at America’s behest puffed up and acting as one of the USA  deputies. War today is America’s economy out of which oligarchs make money and we have subsidized. Was Abbott protecting our national interest  when he sent troops to bomb the crap out of the Middle East or America’s oil interests threatened by ISIS? He wanted us in Ukraine and to “shirtfront” Russia to be the “pillock of the Pacific” and an honorary member of NATO. That was a global ambition but Climate Change was not. Whose cost and interest was he serving? What  substantial gains have we made historically for always being on America’s side while pretending to be independant? Over the years we have seen all our institutuions becoming less British and more American not independant like New Zealand’s has.

The fact is America has a military presence in 149 countries and is forcibly sanctioning those where it doesn’t but wants the governments changed. Even Australia has a presence in more countries beyond it’s borders than China which has only one.

Apparently we argued strongly against the  discovery we were the biggest pp planet warmers? Apparently that’s not in our interest and should be ignored. But not so a global pandemic. Diseases can be discovered like the Spanish flu was in Kansas why wasn’t it called the American flu as the German measles origins unkown. We and Trump want Covid to be called the China virus but  like the others it’s origins have never been specifically pinpointed. There was no urgency back then to do so because it was impossible. Why the urgency now? Because the lens through which this demanded inquiry is being made is not purely out of scientific curiosity.

If the blame game had cast a shadow over all previous pandemics there’d be greater reason of national interests not to publicize or warn anyone of any discovery and simply let “herd immunity” run it’s course. The very opposite of what the Chinese did.  The demand for this inquiry is a very specific one and not exactly at arms length from Trump. It’s easily seen as part of his scapegoating blame game and desperate excuse for his personal mismanagement. Even the WHO has been blamed and it appears his Australian shadow the LNP has fallen in step behind him. This is in nobody’s national interest America’s or ours but it is in party political interest and very individually specific. (ODT

“Australia has arrived at its moment of truth. It is now presented with the explicit choice between sovereignty and money. It arrived this week when the Chinese Communist Party publicly threatened Australia with trade boycotts for proposing an international inquiry into the global pandemic.”

via The money or our sovereignty: China leaves us no choice