ALBANESE & TRUMP TO TALK TARIFFS
I’ve been wondering for weeks when Anthony Albanese might finally get his official phone call with US President Donald Trump. Turns out all that was needed was a declaration from the 78-year-old White House resident that he was going to introduce a 25% import tax on all steel and aluminium entering America to get the two on the phone together.
Albanese told Parliament yesterday he has a “discussion with President Trump scheduled” and he would be making the case for a carve-out for Australia from the looming tariffs, the ABC says.
The Australian reports the Prime Minister’s Office has said the call will take place by Tuesday afternoon AEDT (at the time of writing it was unclear if the executive orders Trump is signing on Monday local time will include the tariffs).
Trump made his latest tariff threat onboard Air Force One on Sunday as he travelled to New Orleans for the Super Bowl. On Monday, Albanese told Parliament: “I will always stand up for Australia’s national interests, and it is in Australia’s national interest to have free and fair trade. We will navigate any differences which are there diplomatically, and we will continue to make the case to the United States for Australia to be given an exemption to any steel and aluminium tariffs.”
In a separate report, the ABC flags Australia’s steel and iron exports to the United States were worth US$237 million (A$377 million) in 2023, according to Trading Economics.
Everyone has thoughts on how the prime minister should handle his call with Trump, with former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull (who is always ready to remind everyone of his previous efforts in negotiating with Trump to avoid similar tariffs) telling The Australian Albanese shouldn’t spend the call “sucking up” to the US president.
“All you can do is stand up for Australia, play a straight bat and make your case,” he said, although he added: “If Trump has decided to impose a steel tariff on everybody, full stop, no exemptions, then it may not be possible to win one, no matter how eloquent you are.”
Turnbull was also on ABC’s 7.30 last night saying the difference this time around in negotiating with Trump is that he doesn’t have anyone around him challenging his views.
“The big difference is that Trump has now got a team that clearly reflects his view of the world. He’s always had this mercantilist view of trade. He doesn’t believe in comparative advantage.
“He believes if a country has a … trade deficit, it’s a loser. If it has a trade surplus, it’s a winner. It’s economic nonsense, obviously, but he’s believed it for decades — and he’s now surrounded by people who will support him.”
Turnbull said Albanese had to find a way to make the case it’s against America’s interest to impose tariffs on Australia and suggested he should consider using the AUKUS submarine deal as leverage.
“We should think very seriously about the payments that we’re making to support their submarine industrial base. We’re sending them US$3 billion to support this, their sort of languishing submarine industry, with no guarantee that we’ll get any submarines at all,” he said.
Elsewhere, the Financial Times reports South Korea’s Ministry of Industry, Trade and Energy held an emergency meeting with steel industry executives on Monday regarding the threatened tariffs. “We will jointly respond actively to minimise the impact on our companies,” it said.
The Canadian Steel Producers Association declared targeting the country’s steel and aluminium exports was “completely baseless and unwarranted” and urged retaliatory measures.
And the European Commission announced: “We will react to protect the interests of European businesses, workers and consumers from unjustified measures.”
The BBC adds China’s Foreign Ministry urged the US to “correct its erroneous approach and stop politicising and weaponising economic and trade issues”.
In other Trump updates, he also said on Sunday he is “committed to buying and owning” the Gaza Strip. He told Fox News Palestinians “wouldn’t” have the right to return to the territory “because they’re going to have much better housing. I’m talking about building a permanent place for them”.
In the last few hours, Hamas has said it is delaying the release of Israeli hostages until further notice, accusing Israel of breaching the Gaza ceasefire agreement, the BBC reports. The British broadcaster quotes a Hamas statement as saying: “Violations include delaying the return of displaced persons to northern Gaza, targeting them with shelling and gunfire in various areas of the Strip, and failing to allow the entry of humanitarian aid in all its agreed-upon forms.”
The Guardian reports Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz has said Hamas’s announcement is a violation of the ceasefire deal and the Israeli military has been ordered to be at the highest level of readiness in Gaza.
BILLIONS FOR RESOURCES SECTOR
Trump’s latest threatened tariffs and Albanese’s attempts to have Australia excluded from them come a week before the next Reserve Bank of Australia board meeting. Next Tuesday we will discover whether the central bank is cutting interest rates and therefore when we’re most likely to get the federal election.
As we await that decision, the Albanese government is working on getting as much legislation passed as it can and last night $13.7 billion worth of tax breaks for critical minerals processing and green hydrogen production cleared the upper house with the support of the Greens and crossbenchers, Guardian Australia reports. The Coalition voted against the centrepiece of Labor’s Future Made in Australia plan, having previously claimed it was “billions for billionaires”.
The site says “Labor will attempt to weaponise the tax breaks into an election issue in WA and Queensland, painting the Coalition as ‘anti-mining’ for opposing billions of dollars in subsidies for the resources sector.”
Elsewhere in its political coverage, Guardian Australia highlights Nationals leader David Littleproud said yesterday “hardly any” public service jobs will be cut if the Coalition wins the election, despite having claimed last year “there will be 36,000 public servants that will go”.
On Monday, Littleproud said: “We’re not gonna have to cut hardly any of them, but we will be looking and prioritising where those public servants are, and we will be making sure that we get the right balance. We’ve been very clear — the 36,000 new public servants that they budgeted for — we can’t see where you’re going to need them, and they haven’t been [employed], in theory. So we’re not cutting anybody’s job.”
The site recalls how Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has said he will reveal his plans for the public servant roles in “due course” (that list of things he’s supposed to announce in “due course” sure is getting long).
Meanwhile, The Sydney Morning Herald reports a “majority of Coalition senators have swung in behind One Nation leader Pauline Hanson’s bid for a fresh parliamentary inquiry into medical treatments for transgender children”.
Yesterday, 18 Coalition senators voted for the motion to launch an inquiry into “experimental child gender treatments” and the need for a ban on gender-related medical interventions for children under 18, the paper said. The vote failed.
The SMH says the voting “drags the Coalition into culture wars on trans issues and risks making senators appear defiant of Dutton, who last week told his party room MPs needed to campaign on the cost of living and could not be distracted by anything else”.
Yesterday, the Nine papers and others highlighted how “Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, the nation’s most senior Jewish politician, blasted the federal opposition for trying to silence him as he spoke about his work to tackle the surge in antisemitism”.
The ABC reports manager of opposition business Michael Sukkar moved that Dreyfus should no longer be heard, which “sparked an outpouring of shock from government benches as Dreyfus was speaking about his experience visiting Auschwitz for the anniversary of its liberation”.
The Age says Sukkar had said members of the Coalition took offence to the claim they had sought political advantage from antisemitism.
The paper says Senator Jacqui Lambie branded the opposition’s move to censure Dreyfus a “disgrace”. She told the ABC: “I tell you what, this is the trouble, and this is why they won’t win the election: going straight to the nasties already. You know, just playing it all out there already, and when we’re not even through our second sitting week.”
Finally, the ABC reports that e-Safety commissioner Julie Inman-Grant has taunted Elon Musk at a parliamentary tech industry event.
Inman-Gran told the Tech Policy Institute event her attempts to have footage of a terror incident removed from Musk’s X platform had been challenging “particularly when the largest megaphone in history is shooting unrelenting waves of vitriol at you”.
The ABC says Inman-Gran also riffed off Musk calling her an “unelected bureaucrat”, by saying: “Look who is the unelected American bureaucrat now”, a reference to the chaos being caused by Musk’s DOGE agency in the US.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE…
A road has been closed for six weeks due to frogs.
In fact, the road has been closed for six weeks due to frogs, toads and newts. The BBC reports Charlcombe Lane in Bath, England, will remain closed until March 23 to protect the thousands of amphibians making their way to their breeding lake.
Helen Hobbs, from the Charlcombe Toad Rescue Group, is quoted as saying: “With a changing climate, it is becoming increasingly difficult to predict the peak times for amphibian movements, which is why closing the road for six weeks really matters.”
Last year more than 3,200 amphibians were helped across the stretch of road.
The BBC adds volunteers spend more than 600 hours patrolling Charlcombe Lane, wearing high-visibility jackets and using torches and buckets to carefully collect the amphibians.
Say What?
You may not like him, but the decision at the next election is not about liking a particular person.
Michaelia Cash
The shadow attorney-general talking to Sky News about her boss, Peter Dutton.
CRIKEY RECAP
Dan Andrews continues to exert a significant influence from beyond the political grave in Victoria. He shares responsibility — with Jacinta Allan — for the absolute flogging Victorian Labor took in the weekend by-election in Werribee, where its candidate copped a nearly 17% fall in primary support, and remains in danger of losing the seat. But such was Andrews’ dominance at the 2022 election that even with a statewide version of the monster two-party preferred swing of nearly 10% on display on Saturday, the Victorian Liberals would fall short of a majority.
It aptly sums up politics in our second biggest state: an awful, rotten and shopworn Labor government — the worst in the country by a mile — but with a divided, far-right rabble of an opposition that for a decade effectively gave Victorians no choice but to back Labor.
Meanwhile, the Greens lost Prahran, continuing a run of electoral failures that can be chalked up to the far-left claque now running the show within that party. As Australia’s third political force, with a reliable base of support of around 12% of the electorate, the Greens should have been first cab off the rank to take advantage of the growing disillusionment with the major parties. But its shift to the hard left has instead alienated voters, and it is suffering the consequences. Future historians of the Greens might see Adam Bandt’s leadership as the moment when the party blew its chance to seriously compete with the big parties.
Pete Evans has been lobbying Robert F. Kennedy Jr to use his paleo recipes to create a “Make America Healthy Again” government website should Kennedy be confirmed as US secretary of health and human services.
The disgraced Australian chef-turned-conspiracy theorist made the claims on a QAnon-promoting podcast late last month while promoting a new children’s recipe book he wrote for a Kennedy-linked anti-vaccine organisation.
Evans has long been an ardent supporter of both Trump and Kennedy, the latter of whom is set to face a confirmation vote for his appointment to the Trump cabinet this week.
The two men’s connection dates back to at least 2020, when Evans interviewed Kennedy on his podcast. The former celebrity chef has privately told people since 2023 that he was working on a cookbook with Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine and anti-fluoride non-profit organisation that Kennedy chaired from 2015 to 2023.
The damage in North Queensland has been extensive. The vital Bruce Highway, the main road artery, has been cut between Townsville and Ingham after a bridge at Ollera Creek was washed out. The army was called in to build a temporary span, but it won’t be able to support heavy trucks.
Damage in Ingham is also severe. The town was inundated, with many houses badly affected. According to Queensland Premier David Crisafulli, an Ingham boy himself, “the devastation is quite frankly, incredible”. Crisafulli had to helicopter in to his childhood hometown on Wednesday, vowing that “I am here to deliver what this community needs.”
History suggests this probably won’t be the last time Crisafulli flies into a community devastated by natural disaster. Recent years have seen a string of floods, cyclones and extreme weather events across the Sunshine State, from floods in Ipswich and Brisbane in 2011, to Cyclone Yasi, Cyclone Oswald, Townsville’s 2019 flood, and more floods in 2022.
In fact, Crisafulli was on the scene back in 2013 as a junior minister after the catastrophic Bundaberg floods, which caused more than $1 billion in damages. Even back then, he was calling for better infrastructure. But rebuilding bridges and levies is easy. Protecting low-lying suburbs of Brisbane and Townsville from floods is a lot harder.
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Trump muses about a third term, over and over again (The New York Times) ($)
‘Almost like surrender’: Steve Bannon on the media in Trump’s ‘Days of Thunder’ (Semafor)
Sam Kerr trial: Conduct of police was ‘completely unacceptable’, defence claims (The Guardian)
France unveils 109 billion euro AI investment as Europe looks to keep up with US (CNBC)
More quakes hit Santorini and surrounding islands (BBC)
THE COMMENTARIAT
Two by-elections tell a bigger story about the wild, unpredictable federal election ahead — Patricia Karvelas (ABC): But while Labor has suffered a monumental electoral backlash — even if they manage to hold on by their fingertips — the Liberals are hardly the beneficiaries of this discord.
That raises serious questions for Peter Dutton’s working-class voter strategy in outer suburbs.
Beware of Liberals crowing too loudly about this result. They will talk big about the rejection of Labor but the real question for Liberals is why are they not getting the majority of the votes of the angry voters?
Labor’s primary vote in Werribee collapsed, but most of the lost Labor vote has gone to third parties and independent Paul Hopper.
Voters are sending Labor a message, but they’re not switching over to the Liberal Party as the alternative.
That can mean only one thing — a federal election that will be a wild and unpredictable ride.
Don’t believe him — Ezra Klein (The New York Times): This is the weakness of the strategy that Bannon proposed and Trump is following. It is a strategy that forces you into overreach. To keep the zone flooded, you have to keep acting, keep moving, keep creating new cycles of outrage or fear. You overwhelm yourself. And there’s only so much you can do through executive orders. Soon enough, you have to go beyond what you can actually do. And when you do that, you either trigger a constitutional crisis or you reveal your own weakness.
Trump may not see his own fork in the road coming. He may believe he has the power he is claiming. That would be a mistake on his part — a self-deception that could doom his presidency. But the real threat is if he persuades the rest of us to believe he has power he does not have.
The first two weeks of Trump’s presidency have not shown his strength. He is trying to overwhelm you. He is trying to keep you off-balance. He is trying to persuade you of something that isn’t true. Don’t believe him.
