The irony is growing greater by the day. 

What to do with China? 

The Premier has been in New Zealand and Australia this past week.  

We rolled out the red carpet, they announced a visa deal for travellers and they also wanted us to put our differences aside. 

The differences were more pronounced in Australia. 

When Scott Morrison asked for an inquiry into the origins of Covid the Chinese went nuts, hit the tariff lever and punished Australia  for a number of years on beef, and barley, and wine. 

Those tariffs have only just been unwound. 

The reason is because they didn’t work. China is basically a bully, and their bullying got called out. 

Meantime in Europe, NATO are openly discussing tariffs against them for supporting the war in Ukraine. 

They have also thrown tariffs at them because they gerrymander international markets in EVs and solar panels. The Chinese have made so many of them they are basically dumping them. 

Australia, wisely, has reduced their trading reliance on China. It was once 40% of everything they did, it's now 25%. What about us? Can we say the same thing? 

No we cannot. 

We are trapped. We have become so embedded we must now pretend a whole bunch of stuff that is happening doesn’t matter. 

China supports Russia, it does business with them, it hosts Putin, it buys its oil, are we outraged? No. Certainly not publicly. 

Once upon a time it was the Uyghurs, now we’ve got a whole damn war, and yet we pretend we can separate all of these things out. 

China is increasingly in the pacific, so Luxon and Peters circle the place with handouts, and handshakes, and talk of long-established friendships in the belief that mates beats money. Small clue, it doesn’t. 

Europe is looking to slap sanctions. We are looking to grow business. Someone isn't on the right side of this.