Australia is braced for the prospect of a protectionist Donald Trump presidency, but a more immediate threat to Australian trade has emerged in the US – the Biden administration.
Trade Minister Don Farrell is meeting his US counterparts this week in an effort to head off trade actions against Australia’s beef and sheep exports in the remaining five months of the Biden presidency.
Trade Minister Don Farrell is in the United States in a bid to halt calls for tariffs on Australian meat exports.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
“Being an election year, there’s pressure on a variety of products, particularly in the beef and the meat sector,” Farrell said in an interview in Chicago. “You do everything you can to make sure you’re not a target in this setting.”
The US lamb industry has petitioned the Biden government to curb Australian and NZ lamb imports.
American producers are asking for protection to allow them to double their share of the domestic market from today’s 26 per cent to 50 per cent over ten years. The US is Australia’s most valuable market for lamb.
“We do not object to Australian or NZ exports of lamb and mutton, but when those exports are destroying our domestic industry we must take action,” said the chief of the Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund, Bill Bullard.
Farrell said he would hold discussions with US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and US Trade Representative Katherine Tai: “We want to assure them that we’re trusted allies, and that we should continue to be able to supply our sheep and beef into the American market. So we just want to assure them that we’re good, reliable partners and that they can trust us to do the right thing.”
The US last imposed protective tariffs on Australian lamb in the late 1990s under then president Bill Clinton, at the demand of US senator Max Baucus.
Farrell is also meeting Republican members of Congress and potential officeholders in a Trump administration.
The US lamb industry has petitioned the Biden government to curb Australian and New Zealand lamb imports.Credit: Bloomberg
Trump has proposed an across-the-board tariff of 10 to 20 per cent on all imports from all countries, with additional tariffs of 60 per cent or more on imports from China.
Farrell said he is seeking to dissuade Republicans from imposing tariffs on any country, and on Australia in particular: “So we’re trying to cover all bases in the election.”
“In the past, there have been exemptions for Australian goods,” he said, referring to successful Australian lobbying to persuade the Trump administration to spare its steel and aluminium products from tariffs.
“You know, we’re free traders. We think we can sell our products to the world if there’s a level playing field. We would be arguing that our special relationship within the US, particularly our AUKUS relationship, should mean that the tariffs shouldn’t apply, but we don’t want them to apply to anybody.”
Farrell will also visit the planned US site for PsiQuantum, the Australian-led, US-based company chosen by the Albanese government to build the world’s first commercially useful quantum computer.
The Australian and Queensland governments in April committed a combined $940 million to build PsiQuantum’s first site in Brisbane.
In recent days the US government has joined with the Illinois state government to invest $US640 ($970 million) in the company’s second facility, to be built in Chicago.
“So you could say the Americans are coming in on our coat-tails,” said Senator Farrell, “and that’s a good thing”.
A single quantum computer, once the technology is perfected, will have as much computing power as all the existing computers on earth combined, according to UNSW quantum expert Michelle Simmons.
The Australian and US investments in the company make it important that the two governments co-operate, Farrell said.
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