Australia’s assistant minister for trade Tim Ayres has said that the trade ties between Australia and China can only normalize if China removes trade restrictions it is still imposing on Canberra.

Tensions between the two nations began to grow in 2018, when Canberra barred Chinese companies from outfitting its 5G rollout, and banned Chinese investment, based on national security concerns. In 2020, the circumstances worsened, when Australia demanded an international investigation into the outbreak of the Coronavirus. In response, Beijing launched reprisals, including placing anti-dumping duties on Australian wine and barley.

On the sidelines of the B20 summit in New Delhi over the weekend Ayres said in an interview with CNBC, “That is a good outcome, but I want to see –and the Australian government wants to see– trade with China return to normal and to be stabilized across the board. Until we remove all of those impediments, it’s not possible to say that trade is back to normal.”

In 2020, China began to levy more import tariffs on Australian products, from timber and red meat to lobsters and wine.

Australian barley has seen its tariffs hiked by 80.5%, essentially eliminating bilateral trade that had been worth nearly $1 billion a year. Australia agreed in April it would “temporarily suspend” a World Trade Organization complaint it had launched against China. Beijing subsequently lifted tariffs on barley imports from Australia earlier this month.

However Ayres said that the Australian government is now demanding Beijing eliminate its tariffs on Australian wine imports which had been introduced in March of 2021.

He said, “It’s certainly not in the interests of Chinese business for these impediments to continue to be placed in front of a range of imports into China. What business needs to see is confidence in the rules-based approach to trade,” and that the upcoming meeting would be “an opportunity to underscore the requirement for further progress.”

Tensions have been rising between the two Asia-Pacific nations over a number of other issues, ranging from Taiwan, to a trade dispute over coal, to Australia’s trilateral defense treaty with the US and UK, which gives Australia access to nuclear powered submarines.