SYDNEY: Australia desires a separate dialogue with China on their dispute over wine, the agriculture minister stated on Sunday (Sep 24), rejecting Beijing’s proposal to hyperlink wine with different commerce points as the 2 nations slowly search to enhance battered relations.
China’s elimination of tariffs final month on Australian barley has raised hopes for an easing of wine tariffs, in place since 2021, which have hammered the nation’s wine exports.
Bilateral relations sank in 2020 when Australia known as for an inquiry into COVID-19 origins, triggering reprisals by Beijing, together with a raft of commerce restrictions that harm Australia’s export-reliant financial system.
China on Thursday proposed a “packaged answer” that might tie the wine dispute to these about duties on Australian imports of Chinese language railway wheels, wind towers and chrome steel sinks, state information company Xinhua reported.
However Agriculture Minister Murray Watt stated on Sunday: “We see them as fully separate issues.”
The federal government desires the wine dispute “resolved in the identical means the barley dispute was resolved – by way of dialogue”, he instructed the Australian Broadcasting Corp.
“We’ll proceed our WTO (World Commerce Group) case relating to wine and we are going to proceed to defend the case relating to metal,” Watt stated, referring to disputes ongoing on the world commerce physique.
China was Australia’s prime wine export market earlier than COVID-19, peaking at A$1.2 billion (US$770 million) for the 12 months to January 2020 when the pandemic hit. Within the 12 months to June, that they had plunged to A$8.1 million.