Australian government ministers still in the dark on tariffs as White House dangles hope of ‘good negotiation’ with president
Australian exporters will be hit with US tariffs immediately on Donald Trump’s self-proclaimed “Liberation Day”, but the White House has left the door open to “good negotiation” to have them rolled back or amended.
The US president is expected to announce new global reciprocal tariffs at 4pm on Wednesday Washington DC time (7am Thursday AEDT), but the details remain largely unknown.
Australian pharmaceuticals, meat exports and other agricultural products are potential targets of the new tariff regime, though the trade minister, Murray Watt, said on Wednesday morning the government had no information on which products would be subjected to the new tariffs, or at what rate.
The prime minister has said Australia’s pharmaceutical benefits scheme, and its biosecurity regime – declared irritants of the US administration – were not up for negotiation: “not on my watch,” he said Tuesday.
Those comments were echoed on Wednesday morning by the foreign minister, Penny Wong, who said “we are not willing to trade away the things that make Australia the best country in the world, like our healthcare system”.
But she told the ABC the government was “realistic” about the apparent inevitability of US tariffs.
“We’ll keep working hard for the best outcome,” she said. “We don’t want the Americanisation of our healthcare system. We won’t be weakening our biosecurity laws, and we won’t be trading away our PBS.”
The Trump administration says it is imposing reciprocal tariffs on countries that put “unfair” charges on imported American goods, seeking to level the global trading field after what it says are decades of imbalance.
“These countries have been ripping off our country for far too long and they’ve made their disdain for the American worker quite clear,” the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told a briefing in Washington on Wednesday morning Australian time.
