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Don't write America off, says Sinodinos

Don't write America off, says Sinodinos

Don't write America off, says Sinodinos
Jun 04, 2020 2 mins, 54 secs

In a wide-ranging interview, Mr Sinodinos said America was resilient and would bounce back from the present tumult, triggered by the police killing of black man George Floyd 10 days ago.

He also said he was confident the world's biggest economy would recover well from the COVID-19-induced collapse and that mounting calls for decoupling from China would create fresh opportunities for Australian companies and investors in the US.

"I say to Australians that I understand why you would be concerned seeing those images – [but] it's not a full picture of how the country is going because clearly vast swaths of the country are not caught up in the same way," Mr Sinodinos told The Australian Financial Review on Thursday (AEST).

Mr Mattis, who resigned in disgust over what he regarded as America's abandonment of its allies in Syria in late 2018, has largely kept silent since.

Mr Sinodinos, in his most extensive remarks since taking over as US ambassador from Joe Hockey in January, said he had been struck by how seriously Americans take their civil rights.

While it's too early to tell whether current events will catalyse lasting change for African Americans, "this is a society which is open and transparent and sometimes when you see democracy up close it's a bit like the old adage about the sausage machine: it doesn't look very nice," Mr Sinodinos said.

Looking ahead to the presidential election campaign, Mr Sinodinos warned China would "inevitably" be drawn into the political fray, creating potential problems but also opportunities for Australia in the process.

"When the President talks about having a G-10 or G-11 – the G-7 augmented –the way we in Australia like to think about it is the focus being on liberal democracies with strong economies who can work together and help to influence international institutions, to help to reinforce the global rules-based order and change the calculus for China so that their calculus becomes one of co-operation rather than competition," Mr Sinodinos said.

He downplayed some of the more vehement demands from Washington's toughest anti-Beijing hawks for an aggressive decoupling of America's economy from China.

He said the push to separate the world's biggest economies had intensified because many in the US found it "hard to know how else to engage with China in China's current mode of thinking".

— Arthur Sinodinos, Australian ambassador to the US.

While many analysts take a bleak view of decoupling, warning that it will drag heavily on the global recovery from the pandemic, Mr Sinodinos argues that it will also generate opportunities for Australian businesses.

Mr Sinodinos indicated that one of his main priorities as ambassador will be to push Americans towards providing Australian companies with more streamlined access to the US national technology and industrial defence sector.

Arthur Sinodinos presented his credentials to US President Donald Trump in early February. Supplied.

He said America's capacity to rebound was also stronger because its economic settings prior to the pandemic were already generating growth and business investment.

He urged sceptics of America's ability to rebound to read Bhu Srinivasan's 2017 book Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism, which, he said, chronicles its evolution as a "great free market economy between government and the private sector that has facilitated America's capacity to adapt to changing circumstances".

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