Anthony Albanese has said he will not bend to president Donald Trump after the US trade body placed Australia’s subsidised medicine system, meat and fruit industries and refreshed media bargaining code in its crosshairs for potential tariffs.
On Wednesday US time, Trump is expected to announce a series of historic tariffs aimed at revitalising the superpower’s domestic industry.
Overnight, the office of the US trade representative released its report on “foreign trade barriers”, listing Australia’s biosecurity regime on importing beef, pork and poultry from US producers as one of its major grievances.
The trade body also took issue with Australia offering generic drugs at lower prices without notifying US patent owners, plans to strengthen laws forcing foreign social media companies to pay Australian media companies for news and plans to lift local content quotas for streaming services.
Albanese on Tuesday said he was concerned the report targeted the news bargaining incentive while raising concerns about pharmaceuticals and Australia’s comprehensive biosecurity controls. He said the three issues were not up for negotiation.
“The idea that we would weaken biosecurity laws is like cutting off your nose to spite your face. In order to defend the exports that total less than 5% of Australia’s exports, you undermine our biosecurity system. Not on my watch,” the PM told reporters in Adelaide.
“I have very clearly indicated Australia is not negotiating over the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. We are not negotiating over the news bargaining code. We will not undermine our biosecurity.”
The opposition leader, Peter Dutton, said on Tuesday he supported Albanese’s decision to stand up to Trump on tariffs, but claimed he would have more “strength of leadership and experience” than the current prime minister.
The US trade ambassador praised Trump for recognising “the wide-ranging and harmful foreign trade barriers” impacting US exporters.
“Under his leadership, this administration is working diligently to address these unfair and non-reciprocal practices, helping restore fairness and put hardworking American businesses and workers first in the global market,” Jamieson Greer said in a statement accompanying the report’s release.
The former prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, who faced his own troubles with Trump in 2017, said leaders had to be prepared to be “as tough as him”.
“The bottom line is, you see [an Australian prime minister] will get the respect from the United States because Trump will see ‘this guy is standing up to me, he’s tough and he has the backing of his country’,” Turnbull told the National Press Club on Tuesday.
Turnbull said Dutton faced a double-edged sword in standing up to Trump – he needed to look tough but also risked alienating part of the conservative section of his fanbase who strongly supported the controversial US president.
“The difficulty of taking on Trump is you’re then taking on the most popular person in the ecosystem in which you live,” he said.
“Albanese doesn’t have that. He doesn’t have the advantage of great connections through … plutocrats and billionaires, but he also doesn’t have the problem that his political base, his media environment … [are] fanboys for Donald Trump.”
The Australian government has said it would continue arguing its case to wind back US tariffs of 25% on steel and aluminium exports announced in March as part of Trump’s worldwide trade barriers on all nations.
Trump in February had promised Anthony Albanese “great consideration” for a carve-out, despite the White House trade adviser, Peter Navarro, consistently accusing Australia of “dumping” its steel and aluminium in the US.
The US is expected to announce further tariffs on 2 April – or “liberation day” as Trump calls it – targeting countries that have the largest trade imbalances with the US.
Trump last week announced sweeping 25% tariffs on foreign cars. Possible future tariffs could impact the agriculture and medicine sectors, with Australian farmers anxiously waiting to hear whether meat exports would be hit in the next round.
