By Richard Bardon

18 Feb.—Unless US President Donald Trump decides to grant Australia a waiver, his recently announced 25 per cent tariff on imported metals will apply to Australian steel and aluminium as of early March. While Trump in his usual style continues to offer the Albanese government assurances one day and threats the next, top White House trade advisor Peter Navarro has made his own case against a waiver for Australia by lying, in an interview with American mainstream broadcaster CNN, that Australia’s aluminium industry is deliberately “killing” the USA’s by “flooding the market”, because is it “majority owned by … China”. Navarro’s record of lies and fabrications to smear China is well known, however; and in reality, the volumes of either metal that Australia exports to the USA is too small to make much difference to the market overall anyway.

That aside, media reporting this week points to two ulterior motives for Trump and Navarro’s grandstanding. The first and most obvious is to press-gang Australia into some sort of renewed “trade war” with China such as Trump waged during his first administration with the assistance of then-Prime Minister Scott Morrison, but which both Australia’s major parties have since repudiated (to varying degrees). The other is to press Canberra to open up Australia to American beef, pork, and fruit exports by removing what the Trump administration reportedly calls “unfair” trade barriers, which were in fact put in place to prevent the ingress of certain pests and diseases endemic in North America—which, were they ever to become established here, would wreck the “clean, green” reputation of Australian food products and restrict or destroy access to other markets much closer to home which are already much more important than the USA’s, and likely to become ever more so. Which is to say that like the USA’s every other political or economic move vis-à-vis Australia in recent years (or indeed decades), Trump’s tariff threat appears designed to isolate Australia further from our own region and bring us more firmly under the imperial thumb.

Trump signed executive orders on 10 February imposing tariffs of 25 per cent on all steel and aluminium imports. “It’s 25 per cent without exceptions or exemptions. That’s all countries, no matter where it comes from”, he told media, as quoted by international news agency Reuters, which reported that the orders “[eliminate] country exceptions and quota deals as well as hundreds of thousands of product-specific tariff exclusions for both metals” such as Australia and Australia-based companies currently enjoy. “The proclamations were extensions of Trump’s 2018 Section 232 tariffs to protect domestic steel and aluminium makers on national security grounds”, Reuters reported. “A White House official said the exemptions had eroded the effectiveness of these measures.” According to Reuters the orders were to take effect on 4 March, although some later reports from Australian media indicate the date may have been extended to 12 March, at least so far as Australia is concerned.

Death by China redux

In either case, Reuters added, “Trump later said he would give ‘great consideration’ to Australia’s request for an exemption to the steel tariffs due to that country’s trade deficit with the US.” As reported 12 February by the Australian Financial Review, however, Trump’s comment, made immediately after a 40-minute conversation by telephone with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, “came just moments after the executive order was released indicating that Australia was not abiding by rules of an agreement not to increase such exports too much. ‘The volume of US imports of primary aluminium from Australia has also surged and in 2024 was approximately 103 per cent higher than the average volume for 2015 through 2017’, it says. ‘Australia has disregarded its verbal commitment to voluntarily restrain its aluminium exports to a reasonable level’.” Navarro meanwhile ranted on CNN that “Australia is just killing our aluminium market. … The major companies in Australia are held—majority owned by—the largest shareholder is China”, the Sydney Morning Herald reported 12 February. “And what they do is they just flood our markets after Biden gave them an agreement that said don’t flood our markets, you can have a reasonable amount.”

As even the notoriously China-hating SMH bluntly stated, none of this is true. First, whilst Australian aluminium exports to the USA had doubled in January on a monthly basis, according to the US government’s own data they “reached only 94,000 tonnes over the year”, SMH reported. “Exports from Canada reached 3.2 million tonnes over the same period—more than 30 times the volumes from Australia.” About 10 per cent of Australia’s aluminium exports each year go to the USA, and comprise barely 2 per cent of total US imports (and Australian steel, only 1 per cent). The exemptions Navarro claimed Australia got from Biden were actually granted by the first Trump administration when he was in it, in 2018; while the recent uptick, the AFR reported 12 February, was “welcomed” by the United States government to help fill the gap left by its punitive sanctions on aluminium from Russia—previously the USA’s third-biggest supplier, after Canada and Mexico—after Russia launched its “special military operation” in Ukraine in early 2022.

As for Navarro’s claim that Australian aluminium producers are majority Chinese-owned, Australian Aluminium Council CEO Marghanita Johnson pointed out to SMH that in fact, “The majority owners of Australia’s four aluminium smelters are Rio Tinto (Bell Bay Aluminium, Boyne Smelters Limited, Tomago Aluminium Company) and Alcoa (Portland Aluminium Company).” Alcoa is, of course, an American company, headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania—so American, indeed, that its name is an abbreviation of “Aluminum Company of America”. As for Rio Tinto, it is dual-listed on the London Stock Exchange, and the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) in Sydney; Chinese state-owned company Chinalco owns a minority stake, reportedly of around 11 per cent (concentrated mainly in London), but the majority of Rio shares (around 65 per cent) are owned by American interests, led by the world’s largest “asset management” company BlackRock.

Navarro making up alarmist nonsense about China is no surprise, however, given he has literally built his career on it. He is ostensibly well qualified, with a PhD in economics and a Master’s degree in public administration; but his personal loyalty to Trump aside, what scored him a job as a senior trade advisor in the first place was his extremely hawkish and supposedly well informed views on China, as expressed in multiple books, notably including the 2011 tome Death by China. As SBS News reported in October 2019, “In at least six of his books, Mr Navarro quoted someone who he called a stock trader ‘in a league of his own’—fellow Harvard alumnus Ron Vara, who has offered such hardline musings on China as: ‘only the Chinese can turn a leather sofa into an acid bath, a baby crib into a lethal weapon and a cell-phone battery into heart-piercing shrapnel’. According to 2006 non-fiction book, The Coming China War, Mr Vara even suggested, ‘you’ve got to be nuts to eat Chinese food’.” As Tessa Morris-Suzuki, professor emerita of East Asian modern history at the Australian National University, discovered while researching an article on “extreme anti-China rhetoric”, however: “The problem is, Ron Vara does not exist. He is a made-up alter ego, who first featured in Mr Navarro’s 2001 book If It’s Raining in Brazil, Buy Starbucks.” Apparently no-one, including Navarro’s various publishers and co-authors, had ever tumbled to Vara’s non-existence—but it was made obvious in retrospect, as Prof. Morris-Suzuki mused, by the fact that on one hand, “[When] I started looking for him, assuming I would find him quite easily, on the internet, … he wasn’t there”; and on the other, that “Ron Vara” is simply an anagram of “Navarro”.

Ulterior motives

Plainly, no serious person should take seriously anything Navarro says. But because Trump does (or pretends to), so must Canberra. As to what the USA hopes to gain, reports published 17 February in the AFR and The Australian provide a credible and worrying explanation.

On the matter of the metals tariffs themselves, the Australian reports that Australia’s largest steelmaker BlueScope “says it stands to benefit from US President Donald Trump’s tariffs on steel imports regardless … but fears for the future of the domestic industry if tough anti-dumping measures are not taken against China.” In the lexicon of international trade, “dumping” means the predatory practice of selling a product in an importing country (usually in large volume) at below the market price in the exporting country.

The reason BlueScope would benefit from Trump’s mooted tariff is that due to recent large investments in American steel plants, it “has capacity to produce about three million tonnes a year of steel in the US”, versus “200,000 to 300,000 tonnes a year of exports from its Australian operations to the US.” Its CEO Mark Vassella however is lobbying the Albanese government to set up “a nimbler and better resourced Anti-Dumping Commission to deal with rapidly changing trade flows as Mr Trump takes on China”, both to fast-track the resolution of a complaint his company has reportedly made and because, he says, tariffs might indirectly “boost Chinese steel imports to Australia and threaten domestic production without the imposition of tough anti-dumping safeguards.” If Vassella has any evidence, though, he did not cite it, rather merely asserting his supposition that “Many of the steel businesses in China and other parts of Asia have got to be just break-even or losing money”. To the extent that this is true of China at all, however, it is due to recent reductions in domestic demand, and thus market prices—the opposite of what “dumping” actually means.

The AFR meanwhile reports that besides American video-streaming platforms (which Trump asserts other governments have no right to tax on income generated in their countries), “US officials say Australian restrictions on American meat, fruit, pharmaceuticals … hinder free trade, arming Donald Trump with a ready-made hit list for negotiations with Anthony Albanese over tariffs.” Keying off “an annual trade barriers report published last year under the Biden administration, which echoes concerns expressed in the first Trump term”, AFR reports, “the office of the US Trade Representative [USTR] complained about Australia’s strict biosecurity rules blocking the sale of US beef, pork, poultry, apples and pears.”

Trump reportedly calls these restrictions “unfair”. In reality, as AFR notes, “Australia closed its market to US beef in 2003 to protect cattle from mad cow disease.” Cured and processed pork products (ham, bacon, Spam etc.) are imported from the USA already; but as industry body Australian Pork explains on its website, fresh pork imports are universally banned because “Around the world, exotic disease outbreaks have caused devastation to local farmers, animals and the economy. This includes developed countries like the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. … In fresh pork, most viruses remain alive and highly contagious.” The same applies to imports of fresh chicken (note for example the current outbreak of bird flu in the USA). And as AFR reports, quoting the USTR itself, “Australia prohibits the importation of apples and pears from the United States based on concerns regarding several pests”—bans which also apply, it did not add, to nearly all fruits and vegetables from almost every country. Hardly “unfair”.

As always, the real issue is sovereignty. As ABC reports, quoting a forthcoming essay for Australian Foreign Affairs magazine by political commentator and Sydney University historian Prof. James Curran, “There would be very few allies able to say to the US ‘look at what we’ve done for you and the access we’ve given your war-fighting strategy in Asia’. We’ve basically given the country to the US war-fighting machine … without any real public acknowledgement of what that might mean for Australia’s sovereignty and freedom of movement. But that’s seemingly not enough for the trade hard-heads in the White House to leave us alone on tariffs.”

Happily it is virtually inconceivable that the coalition would allow such erosion of biosecurity controls, given it would be electoral suicide for the National Party; and thus nor is Labor likely to, at least not this close to what will be a very tight election. The pressure will undoubtedly continue, however, under Trump and whoever succeeds him, unless and until an Australian government asserts its sovereignty from Washington once and for all.

Australian Alert Service, 19 February 2025