Australia's escalating trade dispute with China is already being felt in the rural and regional communities that rely on agricultural exports.
It is a cruel reality for many farmers who have only just recovered from a record drought. And it is difficult news for industries whose expansion into the Chinese market has been a substantial achievement built on decades of hard work.
Australian agriculture is the unsung hero of our exports to China.
Our farm sector has a hard-won reputation with Chinese consumers for freshness, quality and innovation.
Decades of research and engagement in our region has found new ways of connecting Australian producers with the largest and fastest growing consumer-base in the world.
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I have a small personal connection to this story.
As a kid I spent two years in the early 1980s on Hainan Island, then part of Guangdong Province, where my father, a research scientist with the NSW Department of Agriculture, led a long-term project providing advice on modernising China's beef cattle and pasture production.
I am told that during that time I met the governor of Guangdong Province, Xi Zhonghan - the father of the current president, Xi Jinping, although I don't remember the encounter.
This posting was a direct result of the 'sister-state' relationship between New South Wales and Guangdong province that was signed by Neville Wran in 1979.
As Deng Xiaoping opened up China to the world, the agreement was a forerunner of the expansion of research and collaboration that set the scene for the modern China-Australia relationship. China's extraordinary role in the global and Australian economy was built from hundreds of partnerships like these.
Since those early experiments, and because of our willingness to engage with China so early, Australia has managed to chart an unusual course: remaining a key part of the American security umbrella whilst being positioned to meet the import demands of a rapidly modernising economic juggernaut.
This was only going to be good for as long as it lasted, reliant upon a geopolitical stability that has been simultaneously eroded by China's increased assertiveness and its intensifying rivalry with the US. It relied on norms of institutional order and a rules-based system that has proved to be fragile.
Australia prospered - but we have been complacent about acting to advance our national interest in the region. Whether it is climate change, water security, lifting national productivity or adjusting to the obviously changing geopolitics of out immediate region, Australia seems to have lost the knack of solving difficult national problems.
The Morrison Government was too late to see the emergent threats to our prosperity. More assertive action from China in the region, the collapse of democratic institutions in Hong Kong and intensified US-China competition have shaped the last seven years.
The Government has sought - often clumsily - to deal with the security implications. But it had no plan to deal with the economic implications of this change in China's approach.
China appears to be employing a form of economic coercion: targeting industries that will cause as much political disruption as possible.
They have chosen industries where Australia is dependent on exports to China, and where alternative import sources can be easily found. This approach caught the Morrison Government flat-footed.
Each individual decision made by the government in response to China's actions, viewed by itself, seems like the only one available.
But there has been an improvised quality to the government's response. It has been reactive and panicked, reliant on domestic political rhetoric without a sophisticated or informed understanding of the situation Australia faces or a sense of national purpose.
It is Australia's primary producers who are paying the price for the government's failures. And while other countries like the United States have cheered the Australian approach - one imagines they will not hesitate to stock the shelves of Beijing's supermarkets with wine from California and beer made with barley from Idaho.
The Morrison government lacks a clear plan, with a thoughtful approach to delivering Australia's national economic and strategic interests. How will they deliver on the promise of export market diversification? Where is a commitment to find new markets or to shift Australian agricultural exports up the value chain to create good jobs in country towns?
The response of some federal politicians has been a retreat into 1950s Cold War-style simplicity. Some have chosen to imagine an Australian economy without trade with China, or even proposed starting a trade war with China. But Australia can't adopt an approach that means we only deal with other countries in our region with the same values and systems of government and our own.
Our future prosperity and regional stability relies on an ability to manage the implications of a more assertive China and respond effectively in the national interest consistent with our values. The health and vitality of our domestic political institutions is vital to such an effort.
The social inclusion of Chinese Australians and their participation in our political life and institutions is critically important to protecting a robust democracy, as are the universities whose research has been central to our shared prosperity and who have educated thousands of Chinese students in their halls.
Scott Morrison could learn a lot from Australian farmers.
It was decades of patient effort from the agricultural industry that turned Australian farm output into products that are highly valued in the vast Chinese market.
That process, the efforts taken to understand consumer preferences, invest in world-leading practices, navigate global markets and develop deep, person-to-person relationships, models the complex understanding of our all regional partners that our country needs.
That requires hard work, a commitment to the Australian interest, including the interest of Australian agriculture, and a thoughtful, purposeful sense of strategy - all of which seems to be in short supply in the Morrison government.
- Tim Ayres is a NSW Labor Senator
