Anthony Albanese is seeking to reassure Australian exporters about the fate of their businesses under an incoming US Trump administration, insisting he is confident they will be spared tariffs of up to 20% that the president-elect is threatening to impose.
The prime minister said on Sunday that he did not expect any US move to slap tariffs on incoming goods to include imports from Australia.
“I’m very confident,” Albanese told ABC’s Insiders program. “We will put forward Australia’s national interest. I don’t want to pre-empt those decisions, but we’ll advocate for Australia’s national interest. That’s my job to do so, because one in four jobs in Australia is trade-dependent, and that’s why we benefit from it.”
Albanese cited Trump’s upbeat description of the bilateral relationship, offered during the pair’s 10-minute phone call after Trump’s 5 November election victory.
“He said we’re going to have a ‘perfect friendship’ and I’m very confident that the relationship with the United States will stay strong,” Albanese said.
Earlier, the prime minister distanced himself from his own 2017 admission, made at a music festival, that Trump “scared the shit out of him”.
“I will deal with President Trump and I’ll deal with him constructively in Australia’s national interest,” Albanese told Sky News. “And I’m confident that we will be able to do so.”
Albanese was also putting a positive spin on Trump’s declared intention to abolish the US Inflation Reduction Act – the law that provides more than US$500bn in incentives for investment in clean energy technologies in the US. He suggested there may be an upside for Australia.
“There’s first mover advantage, of course,” Albanese said. “And so when there is a change, sometimes an opportunity comes as well. And one of the things we’ve seen is considerable capital flow to the United States as a direct result of the policies that have been in place. Now, if those policies change, then obviously the economics change of investment and incentives and attractiveness.”
He declined to comment on the likely impact on electric vehicle manufacturing of Trump’s threat to double the Biden administration’s existing 100% tariffs on Chinese-made EVs – a sector in which Tesla founder and Trump’s newly appointed government efficiency chief, billionaire Elon Musk has considerable interest.
Albanese also would not name the sectors in which Australia might see some advantage.
“I’m not pre-empting all of that,” he said. “I’m not getting ahead of where the Trump administration might go but they’ve said there’ll be changes and I’ve just made the point that where there’s changes, there’s also the potential for opportunity.”
Speaking from Peru as the Apec summit wound up and he prepared to travel to Brazil for the G20, Albanese emphasised the importance of “free and fair trade” and endorsed the summit’s messages backing climate action and opposing isolationism.
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He also stressed Australia’s commitment to addressing climate change, despite Trump’s promise to withdraw the US from the Paris agreement on emissions reduction.
The government’s message of confidence in continued positive US engagement under Trump extended to security, including across Indo-Pacific.
Announcing that Japan would join joint Australia-US military exercises during US troop rotations in Australia’s top end, the defence minister and acting prime minister, Richard Marles, said a leading US role in world affairs was a matter of “American leadership”.
“The point here really is American leadership is what the world needs to see, and we are confident we will see American leadership under the next Trump administration,” Marles said. “That’s very much part of how President Trump has articulated his message, and that’s what we will expect to see from that.”
Marles said he looked forward to building a relationship with the incoming US defence secretary, the Fox News presenter Pete Hegseth.
“Our message will be that American leadership matters and the rules based order around the world is really important,” Marles said, adding that having those rules is what gave agency to a country the size of Australia.
“I mean, if there is a world which is only determined by power and might, that doesn’t leave a lot of space for most countries in the world – and countries like Australia,” Marles said, in the leadl-up talks with his US and Japanese counterparts in Darwin.