Turnbull still has that post-tariff glow but it’s time he looked at Oz’s own trade regime

Malcolm Turnbull is still beaming from a big win. The Prime Minister at Port Kembla, NSW, yesterday:

Look, what we have achieved is a commitment — as you know — from the President, that the tariffs that he has announced on steel and aluminium, will not apply to exports from Australia. This is so important ...

But he doesn’t always mind a tariff. Turnbull minister Craig Laundy introduces an anti-dumping bill to parliament, September 13 last year:

(The previous law) facilitates the opportunity for exporters to resume dumping and continue to injure Australian industry.

The Prime Minister at Port Kembla, continued:

Reporter: Do you see a contradiction in championing free trade on the world stage, while imposing tariffs on steel imported from similar other countries, back home?

Turnbull: Are you talking about Australia?

Reporter: Yes.

Isn’t it time the Prime Minister walked the walk on free trade? The Productivity Commission, February 16, 2016:

The benefit to Australia from a unilateral removal of its remaining import tariffs would be 1.5 times greater than the benefit it would receive were every other country in the world to remove their tariffs.

Don’t hold your breath. Turnbull, continued:

So we are committed, passionately committed to free trade, but it’s got to be fair.

The ACT Chief Minister wants to stop journalists from entering his borders. Andrew Barr at a Canberra event, last Thursday:

I hate journalists. I’m over dealing with the mainstream media …

He’s not the first to say that at all. The great poet WB Yeats writes in a letter to a friend, August 13, 1888:

I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness.

But even dictators know to try to hide their disdain for the press. Vladimir Putin speaks to Russian journalist Alexei Venediktov in 2001:

Enemies are right in front of you, you are at war with them, then you make an armistice with them, and all is clear. A traitor must be destroyed You know, Alexei, you are not a traitor, you are an enemy.

Sticking with Russia, here’s the Communist Party. A speaker at its Moscow rally, Saturday:

We want fair and clean elections.

Soviet premier Vyacheslav Molotov in Berlin, February 1954:

The trouble with free elections is that you never know how they are going to turn out.

There will be free elections on Mars. Tech tycoon Elon Musk at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, yesterday:

The government on Mars will be a direct democracy. Everyone votes on every issue.

Musk’s Mars will be an outer-space Switzerland? Wikipedia:

(Swiss) citizens can … ask for an optional referendum to be held on any law …

You know what they say about Switzerland, Elon … Orson Welles in The Third Man, 1949:

In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace — and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.