Washington | Kevin Rudd has rebuked the world’s largest base metals trading market for not backing new standards of nickel to counter the cheap dumping of the commodity, which he warned would lead to a 20 per cent cut in global supply sources.

Australia’s ambassador to the United States said officials had been working “forensically” on the issue and that doing business as usual was now “bad for the industry, bad for the future of the global economy and bad for geopolitics”.