New Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has called on Beijing to drop its coercive trade restrictions before considering a reset of bilateral ties.
“It is China that has imposed sanctions on Australia,” Albanese told reporters on June 13. “They need to remove those sanctions in order to improve relations between Australia and China.”
The prime minister’s comments come after Wang Wenbin, Beijing’s foreign ministry spokesperson, said Australia could not hope for an improvement in bilateral ties by simply operating on “auto-pilot.”
“A reset requires concrete actions,” Wang said.
Beijing’s economic coercion swept up eight major Australian exports—beef, seafood, wine, honey, lamb, wheat, coal and timber—after previous Foreign Minister Marise Payne called for an inquiry into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic in April 2020….