‘Fine man’ Anthony Albanese has had a good call with Donald Trump on tariffs, but he still has work to do
And if the executive order the US President signed on Tuesday is anything to go by, the Prime Minister faces a rocky road to land a deal.
The US is arguing that Australia breached the spirit of the last agreement on steel tariff exemptions to not increase the volume exported into the US.
It is not the first time the Trump administration has made this charge. In other words, he is accusing Canberra of stiffing the US on the first deal.
In Albanese’s defence, it was always going to take more than one phone call to convince the US President of the obvious and what previous prime ministers have been forced to do before him.
And expectations that he could simply call Trump and all would be resolved within minutes defies even the logic Albanese once applied to similar situations.
The fact we are even on this merry-go-round again may be absurd but this is the brave new world that the Albanese government finds itself in.
Albanese has to simply deal with it.
On steel and aluminium, nothing has changed since 2018. The fundamentals remain the same. There is still no case for Trump to impose a 25 per cent tariff on Australian steel and aluminium.
Trump even acknowledges that himself. But he clearly isn’t just going to hand Albanese a gift not bestowed to others. He is going to make him work for it. And the argument comes back to volumes.
Asked about the “consideration” of an exemption for Australian steel, Trump admitted there was a case to be considered.
“I just spoke to him, very fine man,” Mr Trump said of Albanese from the Oval Office following the call.
“He has a surplus,” Mr Trump said. “We have a surplus with Australia.
“And I told him that that’s something that we’ll give great consideration to.”
This is perhaps all Albanese could have expected from a first call on this issue.
Trump isn’t unaware of what Albanese has said about him in the past.
And while the US President has signalled that he is prepared to look beyond that, in his personal remarks about Albanese, the proof of the pudding will be in the eating.
Albanese has two weeks to get Trump to go the extra step and do what he did for Turnbull and Morrison by carving out an exemption for Australia.
The tariffs hit on March 4.
Despite the White House making it clear that the starting point on steel and aluminium tariffs was no exceptions or exemptions, Albanese has at least moved Trump to consider Australia’s special case.
Labor types might be cringing at the personal endorsement of Albanese from Trump, but this was an important moment for the Prime Minister.
There is now a lot riding on this for Albanese, beyond just the impact of the tariffs on local industry and the broader economy.
The political optics demand that Albanese secures a win on this, not least of all to buttress the attacks from the Opposition that he is a weak leader. And the signs are encouraging that he may get there.
The Coalition needs to be careful about how it prosecutes the politics from here. Peter Dutton can’t be seen to be barracking against Australia, particularly if Albanese manages to secure a deal with Trump in coming days.
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Anthony Albanese may have won Donald Trump’s endorsement as “a very fine man”, but he didn’t quite deliver the goods on a tariff exemption for Australia in his phone call to Donald Trump.