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.” “They buy it because we produce a lot of it, we produce it very efficiently and effectively, and we don’t have some of the situations that have led to the iron ore price going up so much, like when Brazil had so many …