Treasurer Jim Chalmers was out doing media late yesterday to try and calm people’s farms about the coming tariffs.

He told the ABC:

I mean, first of all, if we are impacted by these next rounds of tariffs, we won’t be uniquely impacted by them, the same way that we weren’t uniquely impacted by the steel and aluminium tariffs. It’s something that’s been applied and imposed on the rest of the world. We think in self-defeating ways, we’ve made that clear as well.

Our job is to make sure that in the face of all of these escalating trade tensions and all this global economic uncertainty, that we make our economy even more resilient, which was a big theme of the budget, and also that we make sure that we make our export markets even more diverse.

The Prime Minister was talking about this this morning [Wednesday]…In the face of these escalating trade tensions, we will do everything we can to make our export markets more diverse, to make our economy more resilient, to stand up for and speak up for the things which make us Australian, like Medicare, like the PBS, like our strong biosecurity arrangements. Those will be our priorities, whatever the decision that’s announced out of D.C. in the next 12 to 24 hours looks like.