Australia’s trade crisis: ‘One foot on each side of a barb wire fence'

Could Trumps latest round of tariffs mark the beginning of 'progressive patriotism'?

US President Donald Trump has redefined the Australia-US relationship with punitive tariffs that seek to threaten PBS/Medicare. (Source: YouTube)

Australian Financial Review columnist Jennifer Hewitt wrote her analysis of the trade crisis facing the government titled ‘Xi is Duchessing Albanese while Trump ignores him’. The op-ed came at a time when sound and accurate analysis into the tectonic shifts in Australia’s geopolitical crossroads is welcome. And wanting. But this sound and accurate analysis was nowhere to be found in Hewitt’s opinion on the simmering trade tensions between Canberra and Washington, and the recent opportunities sought between Canberra and Beijing.

The collective hive mind in the Australian media, now including the ABC, has been taking a rather callous and shallow look at a rather intricate and complex development. Australia has had a tentative relationship with Trumps White House, along with most of the world, that has seen a brick wall in the way of establishing a diplomatic baseline. In the assumed understanding of our long functioning free trade agreement (AUSFTA), but without the open channels usually available, the fist six months of the Trump administration has seen nothing but awkwardly hostile suggestions or tariffs.

A 10% baseline tariff, 25% steel and aluminium tariffs, even a 100% tariff on US import of foreign films to stop ‘propaganda’ have already sent ripples through vital Australian industries, and have not been reciprocated by the government. But the pharmaceutical tariffs are something different, setting up a remarkable moment in history where Australia’s national interest is treated by our largest security partner in a way that is electorally unacceptable to the government. With all but an impasse in the diplomatic cables, and the looming round of pharmaceutical tariffs essentially targeting the part of our values we definitely don’t share: a world leading public healthcare system, the concept of ‘progressive patriotism’ proudly announced by Albanese will be put to the test.

Hewitt reduces the important trade and diplomatic discussions between Beijing and Canberra to ‘duchessing’ and humiliation, but this is an oversimplification, and it glosses over a nuanced and consequential process in favour of scoring cheap political points for her paymasters. Beijing has expressed an interest to expand the agreement to include artificial intelligence, healthcare, and renewable energy, lifted all its punitive trade restrictions, opened up the market for Australian apple producers for the first time, is increasing the import of Australian beef, and keeps up its demand for Australian resources, while our brothers in Washington give us donuts.

Instead of analysing the disintegrating nature of the Australia-US alliance and how it could drastically impact economic and regional stability, the collective press has relentlessly attacked the PM by land, air, and sea for not yet meeting with US President Donald Trump, without daring to ask the question why. Leftovers from the omnishambolic Dutton campaign have lingered in the Murdoch-inspired newsrooms of Australia like an eggy fart. Dutton’s claims that he would be a better negotiator with Trump than Albanese linger in the imaginations of legacy journalists as the Coalition languishes in exile. With their starboard guns disabled after blowing up their own powderkegs doing whack takes on bushfires, floods, pandemics, and genocides, the necrotic and gormless legacy media spew utterly subjective drivel about not being able to see forests from trees, and not doing their jobs properly because their boss is telling them so.

Ambassador to the United States Kevin Rudd has been handing away the steak knives before securing the first telephone instalment, as he waltzes around at Republican fundraisers looking for someone who will listen to him, while using his social media to offer friendly reminders of Australia’s existence to the frenetic decision-makers in Washington. Rudd’s nervous optimism about the great friendship shares similarities to the almost desperate hopefulness of his fellow cohort that came of age in career politics around the time of John Howard, were part of a team that cut their teeth on the geopolitics of the global wars on terror, and decided to bathe in the ‘good vs evil’ axioms of the Washington neoconservative warmongers that have been fed to our bipartisan political class for almost two decades.

Richard Marles sings about the absolutism of AUKUS with a glass so half full that it is spilling on his pants as he dances in rigid choreograph to the tune of Trump’s Washington. Penny Wong says the words ‘shared values’ about the US like it’s some escapist mantra, hoping if she closes her eyes for long enough, the genocidal dumpster fire on the pile of bodies will turn back into the light on the hill. Meanwhile, China is building transcontinental railways and mending bridges with thousand-year-old rivals on its borders, South East Asia is begging for some meaningful dialogue, and Australia sits pretty while the biggest opportunity in the world passes by.

QUT Adjunct Professor Warwick Powell described the current diplomatic and trade crisis that looks to scramble Australia’s sovereign gooch as “A foot on both sides of a barbed wire fence”. Powell remarks on the contradictory worldviews within decision-making and intelligentsia circles in Canberra, whereby one pragmatic side is recognising the need to engage in the national interest with Asia, and the other more ideologically believes Australia’s interests lie in helping the US maintain or reclaim its primacy in the region. The latter orthodoxy is being strained under the chaos of Trump’s America, and the former line of enquiry is perhaps starting to be taken seriously. With belief in the US alliance a mounting liability, and acting in the national interest requiring sovereign courage, Trump’s pharmaceutical tariff might be the kick up the arse we need to get over the fence and start thinking about Australian interests.

Albanese has dithered on tax reform, lost his line and length on AUKUS, and he is pitching the ball up to be tonked for six by the prestige-less media and a diminished and close to invisible Coalition. The Prime Minister may be able to weather the ordinariness of all his middle to lower rung policies, he may be able to keep an undersized AUKUS flapping around on the pier like a fish, or his government’s lukewarm economic ambitions under the guise of two election cycles of small target thinking, but he can’t play a small target with Medicare and the PBS. Albanese has been seen with that little green card more than he has with his family, waving it around like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. And the Canva graphics, the slogans on the FM radio stations, along with the entire vibe of this Labor iteration, has made no secret of its champion status for Medicare. And champions fight for those they claim to love.

As Trump threatens our trade security, lobsters are back on the Chinese trade menu. Foreign Minister Penny Wong is visiting the ASEAN Foreign Ministers meeting in Malaysia this week, speaking with a more open-palmed optimism about a genuine ASEAN-minded approach, in a region that is the most economically dynamic and prosperous in the world. Perhaps there are more shared values in our own backyard than the atrophied sycophantic dominion-like colonial mindsets of the last two decades suggest, and perhaps this period of shallow sub-imperial mindset is fading, and only a mere aberration in a country that was previously jumping optimistically towards its destiny in Asia before John Howard donked it on the head, and the Richard Marles personality type started filling out applications for jobs at political parties.

There is no way the PM can walk back the PBS and Medicare. It may act as the actuator for a sovereign line in the sand, and the beginning of ‘progressive patriotism’ evolving from mere words into sovereign-minded action. These tariffs are dramatically shifting the nature of Australia’s geopolitical outlook, and push decision-makers to recognise the severe nature of their consequences With public concerns from a more informed population, and expert alarm bells ringing out for years, the political class are finally pricking their ears around the pharmaceutical tariffs. As the bipartisan blob, hemmed in by their strident public commitments to Medicare, are forced to reckon with the consequences of abandoning them, it marks the beginning of ‘progressive patriotism’ in its infancy. That could be an exciting thing to see.