Tim Blair: What if US tariffs were instead a carbon tax?

With a single comment on Monday, Trump set about converting Australian climate warriors into furious defenders of our previously planet-destroying metals and mining industries, writes Tim Blair.

Trump the transformer is at it again, and this time he’s achieving even wilder results.

When it comes to acts of magic, of course, Trump has considerable form. During his first term, the US President successfully converted various feminists into their opposite physical forms.

Left-wing actress Lena Dunham, for example, lost heaps of weight.

“Donald Trump became president and I stopped being able to eat food,” she revealed in 2018.

Sadly for her, Dunham’s size reduction didn’t survive four years of Joe Biden. Not to be mean, but Trump’s second term couldn’t arrive fast enough for our girl Lena.

Meanwhile, possibly due to the Coriolis effect, Trump exerted a reverse influence on Guardian Australia columnist Brigid Delaney.

“I stopped going to the gym because of Trump,” the headline on a 2018 Delaney piece explained.

“Now I can’t open jars.”

Those were truly paranormal outcomes, but Trump has now moved on to a higher level of sorcery.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell speaks with US President Donald Trump at Super Bowl LIX not long after Trump announced 25 per cent tariffs on steel. Picture: TIMOTHY A. CLARY / AFP)

With a single comment yesterday, Trump set about converting Australian climate warriors into furious defenders of our previously planet-destroying metals and mining industries.

“Any steel coming into the United States is going to have a 25 per cent tariff,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One, bound for the Super Bowl.

“Aluminium, too.”

This news naturally alarmed the Australian government and most every other Australian besides.

But look at this proposal through former Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s eyes. And former Liberal PM Malcolm Turnbull’s, too, if he can somehow point them away from the nearest mirror.

If Trump had described his proposed tariffs as climate taxes, he’d have been in historic lockstep with much of Australia’s Labor Party, the Greens, the Teals, the Devonshire-tea-and-doilies wing of the Coalition and all other anti-carbon activists.

US President Donald Trump announced 25 per cent tariffs on steel on Monday. Picture: AFP

Why, Trump may even have been hailed as a global Gillard, imposer of righteous penalties upon evil emissions-intensive industries.

Those same mining and mining-related industries, you’ll recall, were previously held in such contempt by Labor Treasurer Jim Chalmers that he couldn’t bring himself to name them.

In his 2023 budget speech, Chalmers merely described steel, aluminium, iron ore, coal and gas as “the things we sell overseas”. They were also the things that generated a rare Labor surplus, but Chalmers plainly isn’t the grateful type.

Labor sure is talking up steel and aluminium now, however. “Australian companies have significant investments in US steel industry creating thousands of jobs,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said yesterday.

“We will continue to make the case for Australia’s national interest.”

Labor Trade Minister Don Farrell was also interested in the national interest. “We have consistently made the case for free and fair trade, including access into the US market for Australian steel and aluminium,” Farrell said in the wake of Trump’s comments.

Yet Farrell last December told the Next Step Global Conference in Singapore about “the need to reach net zero” and “giving momentum to the transition to net zero”. So much for that, then.

Albanese, Farrell and the Labor government are upset that Trump will increase the cost of our steel and aluminium in the US market. Not in our national interest, you see.

But the renewable energy policies pushed by Albanese, Farrell and the Labor government – here’s looking at you, Energy Minister Chris Bowen – vastly and unavoidably inflate the cost of all our exports to all markets.

Everything mined, made, transported and sold in or from Australia is absolutely brutalised by our colossal power bills.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese during Question Time at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Just to stay on today’s topic, the greatest inflator of Australia’s metal prices cannot and will not be Trump’s import penalties. The greatest inflator for as far as can be seen will always be the Australian government’s energy policies, which add massively to final prices even before a solitary gram of metal is shipped overseas.

Remember as well that Labor under Gillard attempted to smash mining with a “super profits” tax. Imagine if that monstrosity had made it into law, on top of madly-increased energy charges.

Given Labor’s tradition of aiming price-raising penalties at the metals and mining sectors, you’d think leftists would welcome Trump’s proposal. It fits right in with both Labor history and the Greens’ eternal anti-progress campaign.

Major Australian business groups, including some of the big miners, aren’t off the hook here. By failing to oppose local climate legislation, they have forfeited their right to complain about foreign tariffs.

If you want to cut our export costs, rip into renewables. It’ll make Australia tariff-proof.