Albanese urged to confront Trump in person after doubling down on tariffs

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has condemned Donald Trump’s latest tariff salvo on Australian metals, describing it as reckless as the opposition urged Albanese to confront the US president about the trade strikes during a coming meeting.

On Saturday, Trump said he would double tariffs on steel and aluminium imports to 50 per cent, days after the Court of International Trade found Trump had overstepped his authority to enact a baseline 10 per cent blanket tariff on all types of goods.

US President Donald Trump speaks at US Steel Corporation’s Mon Valley Works-Irvin plant on Friday in Pennsylvania.Credit: AP

The steel and aluminium tariffs were underpinned by a different set of laws to the 10 per cent across-the-board tariff, meaning Australia must secure an exemption to get out of it.

The US eliminated tariffs on British steel and aluminium in a deal with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer in May, creating a precedent for Australia to strike a similar agreement when Albanese and Trump meet for the first time this month. They are expected to meet either on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Canada or during a trip to the US.

Speaking in Hobart on Sunday, Albanese said the new trade barrier, which will affect about $1 billion worth of Australian metal exports, represented an “inappropriate action by the Trump Administration”.

“This is an act of economic self-harm by the United States that will increase the cost for consumers in the United States,” he said, echoing the language he used after Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is due to meet Donald Trump this month.Credit: Getty Images

“Because it is [applied] across the board, what it will do is not create any comparative advantage or disadvantage for Australia compared with other countries that export into the United States. This is something that will just increase the cost for consumers in the United States.”

Opposition finance spokesman James Paterson said Trump’s move was a blow to Australia. He added that he agreed with the comments of Labor ministers on the subject, appearing to break from previous Coalition leader Peter Dutton’s tactic of claiming the opposition could secure a better deal from Trump.

Paterson urged Albanese to be “respectful but assertive” when he met Trump.

“This is not consistent with the US-Australia free trade agreement,” he said on Sky News. “He’s got to robustly stand up for Australia’s national interest.”

Paterson said it was critical for Australia to help preserve global trading rules because, as a small national reliant on trade, they were key to Australia’s prosperity.

America enjoys a trade surplus with Australia, making it one of the few countries where it sells more than the other nation buys. The US sold $US17.9 billion ($27.8 billion) more goods to Australia in 2024.

Australia exported $640 million worth of steel and $440 million worth of aluminium last year to the US. The cumulative $1 billion worth of metals trade is a small amount compared with the nation’s total exports of $660 billion in the past financial year.

Trump announced the doubling of steel and aluminium tariffs during a visit to the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, headquarters of US Steel, in front of a crowd of workers in high-vis vests and hardhats.

“At 25 per cent they can sort of get over that fence. At 50 per cent they can no longer get over the fence,” Trump said. “Nobody’s going to get around that … Nobody’s going to be able to steal your industry.”

The steel and aluminium tariffs were enacted under trade laws rather than the emergency powers Trump used to levy a 10 per cent across-the-board tariff. The Court of International Trade last week found that Trump had overstepped his authority on the baseline 10 per cent tariff, but those tariffs will remain in place for now after a federal appeals court agreed to temporarily preserve them while the Trump administration pursued an appeal.

The matter is likely to be decided by the US Supreme Court.

Employment and Workplace Relations Minister Amanda Rishworth called the doubling of metal tariffs “unjustifiable”.

“This continues to be a difficult area, but one that we will throw everything at,” she told Sky News.

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