China suspicions revealed

AUSTRALIANS overwhelmingly suspect Beijing of a coverup over the coronavirus crisis, and believe China poses almost as big a risk to their future interests as a global recession.

Those are the key results of a new survey conducted at the weekend by the mobile finance app Humaniti.

Of the 914 Australians who participated in the survey, 87 per cent said they believed Beijing had not been transparent in relation to COVID-19, and 83 per cent said China had not handled the crisis well. When asked about Australia’s response, the results were inverted.

Eighty-four per cent said Australia had done a good job of managing the crisis, and 90 per cent believed Canberra had acted transparently.

China is reportedly threatening to put big tariffs on Australia’s $1.5 billion barley trade after the government urged an international review into the origins of COVID-19 — a possible reprisal which Prime Minister Scott Morrison said yesterday would be “extremely disappointing”.

Professor James Laurenceson, director of the Australia China Relations Institute at Sydney’s University of Technology, said much of Australia’s scepticism towards China’s government was warranted, but was not, in fact, a new phenomenon.

“In Australia we’ve never kidded ourselves that China is a bastion of transparency. And we’ve learnt to factor that into our decision-making,” he said.

“For example, it is almost certain that Australian medical authorities recommended the government close the border to Chinese visitors very early on because they had doubts about Chinese data on the extent of the spread. This turned out to be the correct decision.”

In a list of possible threats to Australia’s future, the biggest group of survey respondents (36 per cent) selected a global recession, but almost as many (34 per cent) nominated China.

Seventeen per cent opted for climate change. Although China was a source of concern for many survey respondents, Dr Graeme Smith, from ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific said: “We can’t live without each other, at least at the moment.

“Somewhere between a quarter and a third of our trade volume is with China, and you can’t change that overnight.”