Rarely has this writer seen so much cant and hypocrisy than in the collective meltdown around US President Donald Trump’s imposition of tariffs on goods entering the United States from certain countries. First prize must surely go to Australian PM Anthony Albanese, who huffs and fluffs his feathers in outrage – in complete contrast to his attitude to certain other countries.
Contrast Albanese’s spittle-flecked outrage at Trump, to his fawning behaviour when China didn’t just impose tariffs but outright banned selected Australian imports. Back then, Labor reserved their outrage for then-PM Scott Morrison, for ‘offending China’. Albanese was all about kowtowing to China to ‘move the relationship in a more positive direction’. Which he duly did as PM: scurrying to Beijing to bow and scrape and beg like Oliver Twist in the workhouse.
Close-run second to Albanese are the exporters directly affected. These are the same greedy idiots who spent decades willfully exposing Australia to the whims of a communist dictatorship in their shameless grabbing for China’s blood money. And they yelped and grovelled like whipped curs when China turned on them. It never apparently occurred to them to diversify their export markets rather than risk everything on the goodwill of the Chinese Communist Party.
When China finally deigned to buy their stuff again, they crawled right back, having clearly learned nothing.
Ooh, but aren’t they talking tough, now?
Australian agricultural producers will boost efforts to diversify markets in the wake of Trump’s tariffs, which they say will have local impacts but also significantly hurt United States consumers.
The US is Australia’s second-largest market for agricultural goods, importing $6.8 billion of our beef, lamb, dairy, wine and other products each year.
Peak groups warned the 10 per cent tariff decision, which flouts a free trade agreement between the two nations, would impact producers, but that these could be offset by growth in other markets.
Yeah, about that ‘free trade agreement’. Here’s where hypocrisy piles on humbug with a big ol’ duplicitous cherry on top.
The thing about the tariffs is that they’re reciprocal. That’s right: the sanctimonious pigs squealing about Trump imposing tariffs on them already impose tariffs on US goods.
Australia charges a 10 per cent tariff on goods imported from the US. In other words, Trump is merely giving Australia a serve of its own medicine.
The EU, likewise clutching its pearls over US tariffs, is one of the most notoriously protected markets in the world. It already imposes a 39 per cent tariff on US goods. Nearly double the Trump tariff that they’re complaining so bitterly about.
South-East Asian nations, especially, have been gouging the US for years. China imposes a 67 per cent tariff on the US, Indonesia 64 per cent, Burma 88 per cent, Thailand 72 per cent and Vietnam an astonishing 90 per cent.
So let’s ease up on the whinging, you almighty crooks.
Southeast Asia is among the biggest losers from Donald Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs with manufacturing powerhouses Vietnam and Thailand, and garment producer Cambodia clobbered by massive US import taxes of 46 per cent, 36 per cent and 49 per cent respectively – far higher than new import taxes announced for India or China.
Indonesia too will now pay 32 per cent tax on $28 billion worth of palm oil, leather footware [sic], electrical machinery and textile imports into US – a huge blow to Southeast Asia’s biggest economy as it contends with a tanking rupiah and declining investor confidence over its government’s big-spending agenda.
Myanmar, currently contending with the worst earthquake in almost a century and an ongoing civil conflict that has decimated its economy, will be slogged 44 per cent, while Laos will pay 48 per cent. The two countries, among Asia’s most impoverished, send goods worth a combined $US1.7 billion into the US market annually.
Cry me a river.
“Relatively speaking (the tax [on India]) is quite low given Trump called India the Tariff King. If you look at the numbers it is in the middle of the pack,” Observer Research Foundation US director Dhruva Jaishankar told the Australian.
“This is in some ways just a starting point for negotiations but India could be in a much worse space than it is. I imagine there were some frenzied negotiations in the last 48 hours and I think (New Delhi) will try to reduce that further” […]
Vietnam has already begun its own pitch for an easier deal with Deputy Prime Minister Ho Duc Phoc and executives from companies including Vietnam Airlines JSC and Vietjet Aviation JSC scheduled to visit the US this weekend.
A starting point might be cutting their own punishing tariffs on the US. Then I might take their whinging seriously.
But nothing will make me take Albanese’s two-faced chutzpah seriously.
