Senator Barnaby Joyce, the Leader of the Nationals in the Senate, said that there are serious concerns in regards to Chinalco’s desired increase in ownership of Rio Tinto, one of Australia’s largest exporters of our major exports.

“We must remember that selling minerals to a purchaser is one thing, selling the mine to the purchaser of minerals is something entirely different,” Senator Joyce said. “We must remember that Chinalco is a fully-owned entity of the Government of China so if relationships in the future fail with such things as honesty in pricing, sovereignty in technology, development of capital or maintenance of Australian jobs, you will be in dispute with the Chinese Government, not with a company, and possibly trying to prosecute that dispute in China. This obviously would be an extremely awkward position to be in. Sometimes clear separation maintains a healthy relationship and we should have a good relationship between our desire to set the best price for our major exports and the governments who represent the major purchasers of them.

“Everybody agrees that Australia’s future has been supported by a minerals boom. It would obviously be in the interest of those who purchase our minerals to try to get them at the cheapest price possible and to use whatever mechanism is at their disposal to try to force those prices down. What better way could you do it than start on a process of purchasing the company that sells the minerals to you and getting your people into key decision-making structures within that company.

“The development of the aluminium refining technology is peculiar to the bauxite it uses. However, if other nations get access to that technology they may buy the bauxite off you but they will expand the processing base closer to home where they have control over it. Australia loses the value-adding premium we currently get and of course we end up with a very limited group of people we can sell the bauxite to.

“Australia must not delude itself that trade is not a ruthless game where participants’ long-term goals are never publicly stated and short-term platitudes are merely a mechanism to achieve a long-term aim that brings the best possible return to the interested party. I cannot see how these issues concerning ownership by the Chinese Government of a major portion of Rio Tinto can be mitigated.

“I feel the impetus of this deal is more likely to have come from London rather than from Australia so the views of St James Square, London, I would have to say are definitively against the long-term interest of the greatest primary wealth deriver of the Australian people, its ownership of its own mineral resource. The mineral resource of Australia from the goldfields that developed Melbourne to the coal of today is the key to Australian prosperity. Don’t lose it.”