I was posting on social media and I ended up raising people’s ire. I don’t go on social media to trigger anyone but it happens with political related posts. It is probably best not to post anything because you can’t give any context for one and secondly the person reading can only apply their own context. Context collision I think is the current academic term. There are two things that annoy me. Imperialism and colonialism. I normally just talk about the Western brand because I am in a Western country. Someone pointed out that the Chinese colonised Tibet or at least impinged on them. It made me remember an interview with the Dalai Lama almost a decade ago but not quite that long. At the time the US was distancing itself from the Dalai Lama as they were in full globalisation mode investing in China. The interviewer asked the Dalai Lama if the abolition of slavery by the Chinese and the Chinese occupation was in fact Karma for Tibets prior slave culture. This question was meant to annoy the Dalai Lama and it did though the Dalai Lama admitted that it could be the case. As US policies have changed so to have the ideas around Tibetan slavery. More recently once the trade war was in full swing the idea of slavery in Tibet was questioned. For example there were questions of there having been little to no slavery in Tibet at all and the idea of slavery was simply a ruse by the Chinese to justify their own ongoing occupation.

If you can’t make out the connections above, and the changing landscape of policies and interests. Then you would be perplexed by the loss of wheat and barley imports to US interests only some months ago. Australia boisterously acted on US policy while the US flouted its own policies. You could say Australia shot itself in the foot. China literally handed the US the pen to ink a deal which Australia once owned. Australia couldn’t understand that the rules of the policy game can change in a moment. Yet the rules governing trade are no different. As interests change so do policies. You have to protect the biggest assets but the US really has no credible policies in its current state. Things just change in a moment. Maybe that is why Australia is so confused and trying to stick to the script. I admit there is a kind of set of policies. The US knows China has most of the advantages in production and are ready to overtake the US in technology. So the US policy is ‘bad China’. That seems to be it. At the same time they will still ink deals with China and hopefully not too many of these deals were once Australia’s. A lot of people are on the US ‘bad China’ side. It isn’t that simple. Policies and politics are a game. We should do what Japan has been doing and just watch the US and China go at it. Why get involved? That is why currently there are 33 Australian ships filled with natural gas being turned away from China. We are being sanctioned by China because we are following the lead of a very flaky America. Australia isn’t a big player. We can’t just change the rules. We need to follow policies that benefit us.