Fortescue director and ex-CSIRO boss Larry Marshall takes parting shot at US president Donald Trump
The Fortescue director, who is also the departing chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in Australia, says the world’s biggest economy feels like it’s being run by a property developer.
Fortescue director and ex-CSIRO boss Larry Marshall has taken a swipe at Donald Trump, who he described as running the US like he was still in commercial real estate and damaging longstanding relationships in the process.
That includes the relationship with loyal American ally Australia.
Dr Marshall said Mr Trump’s tariffs and trade war had put pressure on some companies to consider moving their operations out of Australia to the US. The former top scientist’s comments were made in a speech on his last day as chair of the American Chamber of Commerce in Australia (AmCham), and reported in The Australian on Friday.
“He’s shaking trees to see what falls and, if nothing else, he wants to have a better conversation with everyone afterwards to try and sort it out,” Dr Marshall told The Australian.
“Doing these kind of negotiations is probably fine in real estate because you don’t have to have a relationship afterwards. Once you sell the building, you leave and go on to the next one.”
Dr Marshall said the situation was not as challenging for Australian companies like steelmaker BlueScope and US Navy shipbuilder Austal that has manufacturing assets on American soil, but was fraught for other AmCham members.
“If you’re already manufacturing there, I think you’ll get a little bit of a break. If you’re not, I think it puts a lot of pressure on,” he said.
Dr Marshall is also a director of $1.4bn Australian company Nanosonics, which developed automated disinfection technology.
“It’d be easy for us to say, ‘well, let’s just do more manufacturing in the US and less in Australia’. That wouldn’t be good for Australia.
“I think that’s the danger of the tariffs – they force companies into these economic decisions that may not be the right thing for the long term.”
Meanwhile, Mr Trump’s return to the White House has also cast doubt on whether Fortescue will proceed with a hydrogen project in Arizona that was to have been heavily subsidised under the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act.
Dr Marshall has met Mr Trump twice – once before he became president and once with former treasurer Joe Hockey during his first presidential term.
He said the US leader was shocked and amused when told the CSIRO – Australia’s national science agency led by Dr Marshall from 2015 to mid-2023 – had started earning profits.
Dr Marshall said despite his misgivings about Trump policies, the Australia-US relationship ran too deep to suffer lasting major damage, and could strengthen.
He said in his AmCham address: “Balance is hard to find as President Trump struggles to balance a trillion dollar trade deficit by inflicting an unbalanced playing field through tariffs that really don’t feel much like diversity, innovation, or the ‘land of the free’ and the ‘home of the brave’.”
With the re-elected Albanese government set to push ahead with a critical mineral strategic reserve it sees as a potential bargaining chip in trade negotiations with Washington, Dr Marshall said the US needed Australia’s mineral resources to feed high-tech manufacturing and energy supply.
“Trump needs to rebuild the semiconductor supply chain because he doesn’t want it to too close to China. He’s got to rebuild the supply chain for renewables because they all rely on rare earths. And then there’s uranium as well, where Australia has got not quite a third of the world’s deposits,” he said.
“We’ve got these amazing resources that all feed into that technology. There’s a chance for us once we get over this little speed bump.
“It’s much more likely Australia is talking with the US about ‘how can we make the high-end silicon semiconductors and other high-end components here?’
“That’s something we’d never be able to do without the US, but equally, they could never do without our raw materials and our know how.”
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