More success in 2013, as the Australian Defense Minister Vargas said that,
quote Australia does not want to be put in a position
where we have to choose between the United States and China.
That means that someone's putting them in that position, perhaps the United States.
And he presented a very benign, a non threatening view of China's military rise.
Which is presented, you have to understand is in contradiction or
contradistinction to what had happened 2009.
When the Australians wrote a very strong white paper and talked about
threats from an unnamed source coming down through the South China Sea.
But here he says China has every right
to seek greater strategic influence to match its economic weight.
The extent to which this can be peacefully accommodated will turn
ultimately on both the pattern of China's international behavior and
the extent to which the existing international order.
And we should read that the United States, intelligently finds more space for China.
When this is a reasonably strong position now in Australia
that the United States needs to back off and
give China room to expand within the region as its economy grows.
And during its 2013 trip to China,
Prime Minister Gillard strengthened military ties with the army.
She established a strategic dialog, actually three with the prime ministers,
the foreign ministers and then the finance Ministers.
And again a kind of victory for China in terms of it's
desire to take a stronger position within the global economy,
they established a Renminbi Australian dollar swap.
Which meant that they didn't have to go through US dollars,
they could go back and forth.
Which means that the RMB is now treated as a reserve currency and
this was an important victory for China.
Now, taking a step back a little bit, it hasn't always been so good and
easy for China as I mentioned.
There have been different kinds of push-backs.
And here, we can look at a government push-back,
where in 2009 around the same time that you had a tougher
white paper on security coming out of the Australian government.
Here we saw the treasurer man name Swan tighten control over inbound
foreign direct investment projects by the foreign investment review board FIRB.
And they have to approve projects of large scale investment projects,
foreign investment projects into Australia.
And these new rules increased the latitude, the ability to block
investments by foreign state owned enterprises or
sovereign wealth funds based on what would be considered
to be the government's perception of Australian national interest.
Now these rules mentioned no specific country,
no specific state owned enterprise or no specific sovereign wealth fund.
But many people perceived this as targeted at China.
And China actually sought that way.
And then unfortunately for the Australians and the Americans in September,
a couple of months after this Wiki leagues that insidious leakage of cables and
discussions between governments.
Quoted the head of the foreign investment division of the treasury department,
the head is also a member of FIRB of the Foreign Investment Review Board.
Telling the US diplomats that the new rules were actually aimed
at China to pose new disincentives for larger scale Chinese investments.
So the Australian government in 2009 was trying to slow
down investment, large scale investment into Australia.
But overall except for one deal from Huawei,
the government has not step in and stop any investments.
The bigger problem that works out now for
China is actually resistance from society.
As I mentioned before democratic people and democratic societies often get very
nervous when large scales state on enterprises come in.
And here in terms of Coal-Seam Gas, so
looking for Coal Gas within the cracks under