PERSPECTIVES | ChAFTA at 10: A decade in review

This article appeared in UTS:ACRI's Perspectives on December 19 2025. Perspectives is the commentary series of the Australia-China Relations Institute at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS:ACRI), offering research-informed viewpoints on developments and debates in the Australia-China relationship.

A ‘dud deal’.

A ‘bad agreement’.

This was how Labor opposition leader Bill Shorten described the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement (ChAFTA) after the treaty’s text was signed by Trade Minister Andrew Robb and his Chinese counterpart in June 2015.

Shorten also warned that unqualified plumbers from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) ‘might come and work on your house’ or dodgy PRC electricians ‘might go into your roof’.

December 20 2025 marks the 10th anniversary of ChAFTA entering into force.

But for four months after ChAFTA’s signing there looked a real possibility that the Coalition Abbott government would be unable to secure the passage of enabling legislation through parliament.

The anti-ChAFTA campaign in 2015 was led by trade union leaders who claimed that in ‘nearly every sector of our economy… jobs will be offered to Chinese nationals rather than locals’. The alleged watering down of safety standards meant that ‘it’s not a matter of if, but when, someone is killed’.

Visiting former US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, offered a different critique: that more trade with the PRC ‘makes you dependent, to an extent that can undermine your freedom of movement and your sovereignty, economic and political’. She described a 630-strong Australian business delegation that Minister Robb had led to the PRC as ‘a mistake’.

Yet a decade on, and in the UTS:ACRI/BIDA Poll 2025, a nationally representative annual poll published in November 2025 by the Australia-China Relations Institute at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS:ACRI), 60 percent of Australians agreed that ChAFTA had been beneficial to Australia. Just eight percent disagreed.

The facts around ChAFTA’s outcomes explain the upbeat evaluation. 

Over the past decade, two-way trade with the PRC has increased by 125 percent, compared with 77 percent to the rest of the world. Across both exports and imports, and nearly all broad categories of goods and services trade, the PRC market has outperformed.

Of course, not all that trade and prosperity are owed to ChAFTA.

Deep economic complementarities meant that the PRC had already become Australia’s most important trading partner in 2007.

And over the past decade the aggregate purchasing power of the PRC’s economy has more than doubled, giving trade flows another shot in the arm.

Still, all goods from the PRC now enter Australia tariff-free, while the average trade-weighted tariff faced by Australian exporters to the PRC is just one percent. Local agricultural producers enjoy on average a seven-percentage point lower duty than the baseline rate the PRC applies to the rest of the world. 

Meanwhile, contrary to ChAFTA’s critics in 2015, there are fewer temporary PRC workers in Australia now than then, both in absolute terms and as a proportion of all foreign workers.  

This shouldn’t be a surprise: as the Abbott government and independent analysts explained at the time, ChAFTA’s labour mobility provisions were modest, essentially amounting to bringing the PRC into the line with how Australia’s other large trading partners were already being treated.

The UTS:ACRI/BIDA Poll 2025  found that Australians agreeing trade with the PRC has created job opportunities outnumbered those disagreeing by a ratio of six to one.

Moreover, as policy moves like banning PRC companies from participating in Australia’s 5G rollout and instigating the AUKUS pact show, national security and strategic decision-making has not been compromised. 

It is true, as Trade Minister Simon Birmingham observed in 2020 when around a dozen Australian goods had their access to the PRC market disrupted, that Beijing has not always acted according to ChAFTA’s ‘letter and spirit’.

But it was hyperbole to state, as some commentators did, that ChAFTA was ‘not worth the paper it’s written on’. 

Throughout the episode, Beijing continued to implement scheduled tariff reductions and quota increases.

Also consistent with ChAFTA’s provisions, Beijing and Canberra accepted that three of their trade disputes should be mediated by an independent adjudicator, leading to their eventual resolution.

Curiously, many of ChAFTA’s earlier critics now have little to say about the US even more brazenly walking away from its two-decade old free trade agreement with Australia. Nor can they bring themselves to describe US trade actions as ‘economic coercion’. 

But the Australian public is more clear-eyed.

UTS:ACRI’s poll found that 70 percent of respondents agreed that the PRC government is willing to use trade and investment ties to punish Australia over political disagreements. The share agreeing that the US government was willing to do so stood even higher at 72 percent. 

A key outcome of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s six-day visit to the PRC in July this year was a joint commitment to a general review of ChAFTA, raising the prospect of an upgrade.

A recent survey of corporates by the China-Australia Chamber of Commerce (AustCham China) nominated digital and services trade as areas where value waits to be unlocked.

But perhaps more important for the future of Australia-PRC trade isn’t tweaks to ChAFTA but rather a shift in government and business mindset.

AustCham China chair Vaughn Barber puts this well: what’s most needed now is to move beyond the easy wins of complementarity to building joint capability and joint risk management — combining technology, talent, and capital to create sustainable solutions that neither economy can achieve alone.