Trump is the US president Australia had to have

The back and forth about Australia’s desire for an exemption from Donald Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminium tells a sad tale about our country in this election year of 2025. We’re a wealthy, highly urbanised, industrialised, modern G20 nation. But there remains something of the colony about Australia – a far-flung place constantly looking for older, more powerful friends to look after us economically and militarily.

Trump is brazenly upending the world order, threatening mostly America’s friends at this early point in his presidential restoration. He may be about to blow up Gaza again at the weekend. He’s been having private talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin about Ukraine that could well result in a dramatic transformation of Europe’s security and military arrangements. His unilateral edict on the steel and aluminium tariffs came just days after our Deputy Prime Minister, Richard Marles, met Trump’s defence secretary and handed over $800 million to boost America’s submarine building capacity.

Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton are going to need to confront the profound changes that Donald Trump brings to the world order.Credit: Dionne Gain

That was a down payment on the AUKUS pact with our greatest friends, the United States and the UK – a bipartisan policy. How’s that stroke of multi-generational policy genius looking right now? AUKUS didn’t mean a thing to Trump, at least as far our economic interests are concerned. Not even the fact that we buy considerably more from America than we sell to it mattered in the moment. The best that our biggest protector would come up with in his Tuesday phone call with Anthony Albanese was that he’d think about an exemption.

It’s an act of utter disrespect to a faithful partner, but out of his chaos, Trump could well end up doing us a favour by forcing us to confront our new reality. Don’t expect our politics industry to call out Trump, though; given how much we’ve leaned into our dependence on America, the major parties are scared of Trump – as well they might be during his more ferocious, cult leader-style second presidency. They don’t know what to say about him or which way to look right now.

Take Peter Dutton. Under the circumstances, it seems that Albanese did as well as he could in the call. After learning that Albanese had not messed up, Dutton emerged to warn the US president that there was a bipartisan position here on the tariffs, and if we are not exempted, the America-Australia relationship would be damaged. This mild finger-wagging in the direction of the White House came just days after Dutton had responded positively to Trump’s prescription for Gaza as a Middle Eastern Surfers Paradise cleared of Palestinians. Trump was, Dutton said, shrewd and a big thinker.

Naturally, Dutton’s bipartisan stance had its limits. He also declared that Albanese, Foreign Minister Penny Wong and ambassador Kevin Rudd had already hurt the relationship with America with their past criticisms of Trump. This conveniently ignores the fact that J.D. Vance’s past description of Trump as reprehensible and an idiot did not preclude him from becoming Trump’s chosen 2024 vice-presidential running mate.

In any event, having established the bipartisanship fig-leaf, the Coalition and its media friends are hell-bent on setting up the tariff exemptions as a test because Malcolm Turnbull as prime minister extracted exemptions in 2018. It’s not a fair comparison. Turnbull’s success came when Trump was still unfamiliar with power and mostly employed regular people who put some guardrails around him. Now, of course, he has surrounded himself with advisers and a cabinet who praise his every utterance and try to normalise all of his flights of policy fancy. He is the planet’s most powerful man, set on holding the rest of the world hostage. By definition, every test is based on rational principles, and Trump is in the process of reducing rationality down to his whims and self-interest. The idea of anyone passing a Trump test is fast becoming absurd.

What we’re getting is only a taste of what’s to come, but in just a few weeks, compassion and a broad commitment to multilateralism have already been jettisoned from the American government. Much more is to come. This is especially concerning for Australia because of the depth of our ties to America.

With no more than three months to go before Australians decide whom to elect – Labor or the Coalition or various minority government versions of one of them – are we equipped within our political system to respond meaningfully to four years of Trump’s combination of capriciousness and ideologically driven extortion and their consequences?

Clearly, the world is changing quickly and in profound ways. But you don’t get any real sense yet that this needs to be confronted and made part of our national debate; our political leaders only acknowledge it inferentially at best. So much of our contemporary politics is insular and that is unlikely to suffice from here on. Just one example: artificial intelligence is about to drive one of the great industrial, social and cultural revolutions. French President Emmanuel Macron is a spent force, but even he has convened a two-day conference on it. Should it not be an important subject at a leaders’ level in our political conversation? Are we going to be just takers rather than makers as this revolution changes our lives? It’s hard to imagine AI being an easy subject for Albanese or Dutton. They are, for the most part, political journeymen – veteran parliamentarians both. Neither of them has ever been accused of being policy visionaries.

With the election campaign under way in all but the official sense, it’s difficult to accept that the political debate thus far is the best we can do. Of course, the standard of living will always be central to any political contest, but politics works best when the debate deals with not just our todays but our tomorrows as well. Instead, the leaders have their lists: Albanese on cost-of-living measures already introduced and Dutton on a few uncosted side issues and his trademark resentful tough guy stuff.

Donald Trump could well be inadvertently doing us a favour, forcing us to think seriously about a changing world and how we will navigate it. And it might lead us to demand that either our political leaders do better or we’ll get some better ones.

Shaun Carney is a regular columnist.

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