Over in Nationals land and leader David Littleproud seems to think it is 2016 in Trump land and Australia just needs to advocate to ensure its exports are not hit by Trump’s tariffs (a reminder that it is the US importers/exporters who pay the tariff and the US is in a trade surplus with Australia)

Littelproud told Sky News very early this morning:

“Ultimately, we prefer to see a rules-based world trade order that’s served Australia well and served the globe well in getting living standards higher for everybody. So it’s important that we respect those and trade wars don’t actually help anyone. In fact, they add to inflation because they are tax, and ultimately someone has to pay for that. So we’d prefer to see that both countries can sit down. I appreciate that President Trump came with a mandate. He made it very clear, particularly for Mexico and Canada, around border protection that they needed to lift their game.

Otherwise, tariffs have been imposed, but there’s also these tariffs feeding into China, which will have an impact. Now that means that if we get a slow down on the economy, they’ll have a broader impact on Australia. But we may get some short-term gains, particularly out of agriculture.

The last time we saw this, when President Trump was here last time and he imposed tariffs on China, we actually saw increases in commodity prices for ourselves, because China pivoted to Australia, rather the United States. But there are only short-term gains and no one should think that that’s what we should be aiming for. We’d rather see that the rules-based order returns and that problems are resolved and we get on with free trade between our nations, because we’re only a nation of 27 million people and we are a trading nation. And unless we have those that environment created for us, then ultimately Australians will bear the cost of that, ultimately at the checkout.”