Not an exact mirror. Look at what happened a couple of months ago, when the arbitrage window opened. China found itself receiving 100,000s of thousands of tons of metal from Russia, India and other sources.

The thing about alumina is, there aren't many jobs to protect, and the companies producing it in Australia are wholly or partly owned by foreign interests. But banning Australian alumina would lead to the question, what about Australian bauxite? Will that be next on the list?

The irony is, for generations Australia has been on the wrong side of the equation. We sell iron ore and buy steel products. We sell wool and buy clothes. We sell bauxite and alumina and import aluminium. Then we wonder where all the manufacturing jobs went. Banning Aussie iron ore and alumina breaks that cycle.