Beijing Has No Choice but to Buy Australia’s Iron Ore: Economist
Despite politically motivated trade sanctions on Australian goods, Beijing has been left buying Australia’s expensive iron ore by the boatload.
Professor of Economics at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Richard Holden, said that Canberra holds a great deal of influence over Beijing, who has nowhere else to turn to meet its ravenous iron ore demand, even if it wanted to.
“We’ve actually got quite a lot of leverage with China in this instance, which is that they need a lot of iron ore,” Holden told The Epoch Times. “And they don’t buy iron ore from us because they want to be particularly nice to Australia.”
China’s Hunger for Iron Continues to Underpin Australia’s Economy
Last month, Australia funnelled more than a third of all its exports to feed China’s insatiable appetite for iron ore.
Recent Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data revealed that June saw a record month in history as exports of the Australian ore to the Chinese communist regime reached an unprecedented $15 billion (US$11 billion).
This was out of $19 billion (US$14 billion) of shipments sent to China, breaking further records as Australian exports surpassed $40 billion (US$30 billion) in June alone.
China even splurged on its second largest acquisition of Australian gold bullion worth $850 million (US$625 million), almost double what it had imported in May.
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He added that because Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps produces a lot of the agricultural products that are then exported from the region this increases concerns. The US placed sanctions on this company citing human rights abuses against the Uyghur. Chinese customs data shows exports from Xinjiang to New Zealand included a range of products such as cotton sheets and clothing, furniture, tomato paste, grapes and jam and marmalades. Globally there are significant concerns about China’s minority Uyghur population due to the arbitrary detention of up to a million people in Xinjiang. Detainees and prisoners are subjected to torture and other ill-treatment, cultural and political indoctrination, and forced labour, according to US non-profit Human Rights Watch. China denies the existence of forced labour in Xinjiang and says the arrangements are voluntary and part of a poverty alleviation programme, while the camps are part of a crackdown on terror.
Here are the five biggest claims to come from the report.
1. TikTok’s Algorithm Can Promote Misinformation And Dangerous Content, Including Eating Disorders
“It takes less than 30 seconds to find harmful content on TikTok, and a few hours for the algorithm to dominate someone’s feed with offensive videos, according to several researchers,” the
Four Corners report claimed.
The report referenced tech advocacy organisation Reset Australia, citing their experiments that discovered it “takes about four hours for the algorithm to learn that a 13-year-old is interested in racist content, and about seven hours for sexist videos to swamp someone’s feed.”