The clock is ticking on whether Australian steel and aluminium producers will be the next victims of Donald Trump’s America First agenda.
Tariffs of 25 per cent on more than a billion dollars of exports to the United States are scheduled to start this week, with hopes of an exemption fading.
Australian officials are dabbling at speed date diplomacy with American counterparts in a bid to win a tariff exemption before Wednesday.
But so far, the signs aren’t good.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese personally lobbied the president last month in a phone call, and for a while it was promising.
“I told him that’s something we’d give great consideration to,” Trump said at the time.
Now one of the president’s senior advisers has suggested an exemption is unlikely.
“He really doesn’t like the word ‘exemption’,” National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett said.
“If I walk in and offer an exemption then I’ll probably get kicked out of the office, we’ll see how it goes, but maybe there’ll be some, but I doubt it.”
Albanese said: “It is in Australia’s interest but it’s also in the economic interests of the United States for Australia to be exempted.”
The incoming Canadian prime minister has pledged to maintain his predecessor Justin Trudeau’s tit-for-tat trade war with the US.
“My government will keep our tariffs on until the Americans show us respect,” Mark Carney said.
According to one senior source, whether Australia does dodge tariffs on steel and aluminium might depend on who Trump speaks to last.
The US president is unmoved by concerns that it’ll be the American consumer who’ll pay.
“We’re going to take in hundreds of millions of dollars in tariffs and we’re going to become so rich, you’re not going to know where to spend all that money, I’m telling you, you just watch,” Trump said.
