US and China tariffs both acts of bullies, but our reaction is different
The gaslighting. The increasing demands following acquiescence. The bluster and bullshit — the Trump administration’s tariff demands of Australia precisely fit the pattern of bullying.
First, the no-exemptions-maybe-an-exemption response from Trump immediately after Anthony Albanese’s call apparently establishing an exemption would be considered. Then, the gaslighting: a Trump administration official claiming Australia was “killing the aluminium market” in the US. According to the US government’s own data, from February 2024 to now, Australia has supplied a grand total of 1.68% of US aluminium imports.
Now come the increasing demands: Australia’s biosecurity laws — preventing, for example, America’s avian flu-riddled poultry industry from open-slather imports here — local content requirements and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme are all problems for the Trump administration. That’s on top of the Albanese government pausing any plans to regulate Trump’s big tech cronies.
Related Article Block Placeholder
Article ID: 1191494
The response is in spectacular contrast to the Morrison government’s response to China’s tariff-based bullying, which sent relations between Australia and its biggest trading partner into the deep freeze until the election of the Albanese government thawed them.
China, too, imposed tariffs. It, too, issued a list of demands — cracking down on media reports critical of China, reversing the ban on Huawei, ending foreign investment bans on Chinese companies, halting human rights criticisms. But China didn’t demand Australia dismantle its social safety net, or abandon attempts to protect Australian culture, or allow devastating agricultural diseases in for the profit of foreign companies.
And unlike the United States, China had some economic basis for its grievances: according to Australian Bureau of Statistics trade data, in 2021 its goods trade deficit with Australia hit $91 billion (it was still $68 billion last year). That compares to our trade deficit with the United States of US$17.9 billion — a figure that has steadily grown in favour of the US since the Howard government foolishly signed a free trade agreement with the Bush administration.
Moreover, Australia routinely used protectionist measures such as the iniquitous, inflationary Anti-Dumping Commission to block cheaper imports of Chinese products such as steel — during the 2010s, an investigation of dumping was launched against China on average once every 17 days.
Australia’s refusal to submit in the slightest to Chinese coercion paid dividends: one by one, tariffs and restrictions were lifted by the Xi Jinping regime, which had realised coercion was mainly harming the Chinese economy (for instance forcing it to rely on poorer quality Indonesian coal) and enabling Sinophobes in Australia’s governing and media class.
In contrast, Anthony Albanese is being praised for refusing to criticise Donald Trump, even as the president proposes outrages such as the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians or the appeasement of Vladimir Putin. Far from learning the lesson that standing up to bullies works in Australia’s national interest, Australia’s government — with the complete support of its Trump-loving political opponents — has decided pandering to the mad king is the best strategy.
Related Article Block Placeholder
Article ID: 1194003
That’s despite the fact that, in relation to the United States, Australia holds far more cards than it does re: China. The United States depends on Australia for major strategic assets — its electronic signals interception facilities, its coordination with Australian intelligence agencies, its use of Darwin as a forward base for its marines, its access to non-Chinese controlled critical minerals, and our routine purchase of hundreds of billions of dollars of weaponry manufactured in the United States or by US companies, armaments that could easily be sourced from other, often superior, manufacturers in France or Germany.
In the meantime, out the other side of its economic coercion fetish, China now seems a comparatively stable force in international affairs, supporting the existing international trading system from which Australia benefits so much and playing a significant role in decarbonisation via its massively subsidised electric vehicle industry, to the benefit of Western consumers. Nor has Xi Jinping discussed publicly making Vietnam or South Korea a province of China, or taking control of the Malacca Strait.
And while Australian policymakers may tell themselves that Trump is transactional, and nothing need really change in our vassal-state dependence on the United States, it would be irrational not to wonder: what if America never goes back to normal? What if the second Trump presidency is only the prelude to the long-term MAGAisation of the United States, turning our colonial overlord into a fascist dystopia run by tech moguls, one with the corruption, health outcomes and public infrastructure of a third-world country, Saudi Arabia-like oppression of women and the imperialist aggression and economic structure of Putin’s Russia?
We face this dilemma because the Australian policy establishment, and particularly our security bureaucrats, never understood or accepted Paul Keating’s warning that Australia needed to find its security within Asia, not from outside Asia — that it couldn’t simply continue to cuddle up to the latest imperial Anglophone power. Now we’re hanging on for dear life on the coattails of a mad king — pretending everything is fine.
Have something to say about this article? Write to us at [email protected]. Please include your full name to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
