When you’re getting shown up by Keir Starmer, then you really know you’ve screwed it. That’s the unenviable position Australia finds itself in, courtesy of our bumbling, far left-ideological hack of a PM, Anthony Albanese.
Like New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, Albanese thought he could get away with playing to the peanut gallery and repeatedly insulting Donald Trump. Not to mention appointing the widely-loathed Kevin Rudd as US ambassador, from which taxpayer-funded tower he likewise proceeded to sneer and belittle Trump.
But then The Donald got voted back in in a landslide, and he’s clearly not about to do any favours to those two arseholes. Where other world leaders have been able to secure meetings with, and concessions from, Trump, Australia’s piss-poor excuse for a government has been left out in the cold.
And we’re all going to pay.
The latest Trump announcement, of potentially a huge tariff on pharmaceuticals, is much worse news for Australia than most of the other tariff measures Trump has taken or threatened. For pharmaceuticals are one of the very few areas of our economy, beyond mining, where we display mastery of complex technology that converts into commercial success.
It’s the high end of our tiny manufacturing sector and the $3bn of pharmaceutical exports we send to the US are an important beachhead.
As far as the White House is concerned, Australia is dumping cheap, government-subsidised pharmaceuticals in its market. For all RFK Jr’s big talk about taking on Big Pharma, it’s clear who the Trump administration is really listening to.
US President Donald Trump has threatened to expand his sweeping global trade war by pushing tariffs on pharmaceutical products as high as 200 per cent, raising fears for the future of Australia’s cheap medicines.
The tariff threats follow aggressive lobbying by the US pharmaceutical industry explicitly targeting Australia’s Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme – with pharmaceutical giants hoping to “leverage ongoing trade negotiations” against the PBS.
What, exactly, is the Trump administration’s beef with the PBS?
Australia has been targeted aggressively by the US pharmaceutical lobby since the appointment of the Trump administration over accusations that the PBS has undervalued US products and stymied innovation.
The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) group […] said in a January submission to the US trade review that US companies were the “constant target of compulsory licensing and other harmful practices” by Australia and the PBS […]
“Australia undervalues new innovative medicines by setting prices based on older inferior medicines and generics, and through use of low and outdated monetary thresholds per year of life gained from clinically proven treatments,” PhRMA said more recently.
“In addition, government assessments often restrict access to a small subset of the patient population for which the regulator determines the product to be safe and effective and additionally create considerable patient access delays through unnecessary data requirements and other administrative hurdles.”
For a new drug to be made available to Australians, it must first be approved by the Therapeutic Goods Administration, but it retails at the price set by its producer. Those prices can be into the hundreds of thousands of dollars per dose. But if the drug is approved by the PBS, it is subsidised by the taxpayer, with the patient making a capped co-payment. Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee (PBAC) rules which medications are allowed to be included in the PBS. The PBAC can also limit the purposes for which a new drug is used. For example, Ozempic is currently only approved for treating Type 2 diabetes: patients using it for weight loss must pay full cost.
The PBS costs Australians about $18 billion a year. Less than one third of that is repaid to the Australian government by the pharmaceutical industry.
The PBS was a centrepiece of Anthony Albanese’s election campaign, during which he pledged to reduce the maximum price of all PBS-listed medications from $31.60 to $25 by the end of the year […]
Before the election of Mr Trump, the PBS was facing accusations of mismanagement over concerns it could not meet demand, had an inflexible administrative style and was leaving patients in limbo because of protracted waiting times on decisions.
The Albanese government conceded it was unfit for purpose, having commissioned three assessments in recent years.
With all that in mind, some industry spokespeople in Australia are arguing that Australia should be using the tariff threat as a spur to reforming the PBS.
CSL chairman Brian McNamee urged the Albanese government to make the PBS more efficient and allow innovative American drugs into Australia faster, saying the nation benefits as much from US innovation in medicines as it does from the protection the nation gets from the Pentagon’s defence spending in the Indo-Pacific.
But this is a socialist government addicted to being seen to be giving away ‘free stuff’. And it’s also a government that clearly despises Australia’s biggest and most important ally, the US. Hence, the PM is about to scramble for his fourth session of kow-towing and taking orders from Xi Jinping, while standing out by poor example as one of the few Western leaders yet to meet with President Trump.
A good government would be pulling all the levers, using its high-quality, inside relationship with Trump, and making sure we are heading towards a match-fit, competitive economy.
A good government would, yes. But we have the Albanese government instead.
