Blocking cheap EVs won’t make China kinder, but it might kill our reef

Australia, we are told, has a problem. China wants to sell us cheap electric cars. How dare they! Chinese makers have been overproducing, nobody is making money, and prices are going down. You can buy, if you’re sufficiently unpatriotic, a BYD Dolphin for something like $32,000 driveaway – not as cheap as they’re selling it for in Shanghai, but then I suppose Temu has to charge something for delivery.

Cheap cars? No, we can see right through China’s contemptible evasions. We must, evidently, unite with the Europeans and the Japanese and Mexicans and Koreans and British and fend off these vile corruptors – a new coalition of the willing, a Grand Alliance, standing forthright against communism? Capitalism? Something that needs standing against, at any rate.

Looking at that list of our prospective allies in this conflict, you will notice that all of them seem to have their own car manufacturing sectors, long-established names like Ford and Volkswagen and Hyundai that have been slower than the Chinese to turn away from petrol towards batteries and are thus having their collective lunches eaten. You will notice, too, that Australia doesn’t have a single car factory from sea to shining sea (another great brain fart from Tony Abbott), having got out of the business between 1985 and 2017. We have absolutely nothing to gain from all this. If we’re going to rebuff Chinese cheapies, it’ll be an entirely disinterested operation.

We’ll be making considerable sacrifices, in fact. Apart from us as individuals having a few thousand extra notes to fritter away on lattes and smashed avo toast, it’s going to be very hard for Australia as a nation to meet even the inadequate carbon goals we’ve set for ourselves unless the uptake of EVs goes up from its current 10 per cent to 50 per cent at least. Every Chinese car stopped at the docks means another few metres of the Great Barrier Reef bleached.

Economically speaking, too, every dollar charged by Ford or Ferrari heads overseas, kicking us in the Balance of Payments as it swaggers off. Still, getting involved in other countries’ squabbles without recompense or reason is very much the Australian way, so why stop now?

I had hoped, when the Liberals decided that enough was enough and pushed the car industry in the deep end to sink or swim (spoiler: sink), this would at least mean we could begin to have a rational industry policy, unmoved by petty electoral considerations of factory closures or unemployment jumps. We no longer needed to have our trade negotiations snarled up with irrelevancies, we could impose whatever rules about carbon intensity we wanted to, and we could reap the promised rewards of free trade.

Not so fast, sunshine. Something – nostalgia? Muscle memory? The PM’s desire to stand on stage in a line with rather more celebrated heads of state? – apparently means that we’re morally obliged to behave as if none of that matters.