Wall Street’s S&P 500 — the world’s most widely followed share market index — has fallen more than 10 per cent in less than a month.
Investors are voting with their feet in the face of the uncertainty about the Trump administration’s ever changing policy decisions, but a growing belief that most of the things he has been doing are bad for the US economy.
Australia is also having to re-assess its 80-year over-investment in the United States in the wake of the decision this week to impose 25 per cent tariffs on our steel and aluminium exports.
No, we aren’t special. In case you had somehow missed the message.
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Coalition claims it could have struck a deal
At home, too much of the public discussion has focused on whether the prime minister did enough to stop this happening.
This is in the face of the stark evidence that the ‘America First’ of Donald Trump gave no exemptions to any other countries, no matter how much they sucked up to him, went to visit, or phoned.
It is in the face of clear statements from the administration that there weren’t going to be exemptions, largely because they had given them to countries like Australia last time and that hadn’t been good for the American people.
But yet the opposition has continued to use what is becoming positively tiresome as its only response to any issue that comes up — that it is the prime minister’s fault, while mounting the unsubstantiated claim that it could do better.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and his trade spokesman Kevin Hogan argued on Friday that they could achieve a deal where Anthony Albanese couldn’t because Dutton would meet Trump in person.
(That would be, for example, like the UK’s Keir Starmer and France’s Emmanuel Macron did — and got hit with tariffs anyway but unlike Trump’s good friend, India’s Narendra Modi who didn’t meet with him, and also got hit with tariffs.)
The Coalition had strong bargaining chips like Australia’s critical minerals (used in the Albanese government’s negotiations), Hogan said.
What was more, there was also the “$800m AUKUS cheque that Richard Marles just went over and threw on the table as part of the deal with AUKUS”, Hogan declared on ABC radio without apparently noting the rather obvious weak point in that argument that the cheque had been on the table when the government was trying to negotiate and it did no good.
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Spectre of Trump looms over federal election
The prime minister resisted calls to be more critical of President Trump — on issues from Gaza to Ukraine — in the lead up to the final deadline for the decision on steel and aluminium tariffs.
He has ratcheted his language up subsequently, still aware that there is the likelihood of more tariffs on other sectors to come and giving the Trump administration no reason to make a decision, like the steel and aluminium one, which in Albanese’s words was “entirely unjustified”, “against the spirit of our two nations enduring friendship, and fundamentally at odds with the benefits that our economic partnership has delivered over more than 70 years”.
But Australia now goes into an election campaign in which the spectre of Trump, his economically reckless policies at home, and his erratic attempts at foreign policy machismo loom large, and in which both sides will be under pressure to step up the language.
The domestic political ramifications of this week’s tariff decision play out as something voters can see as a direct affront to the country as a whole. The hollowness of Dutton’s claim that it is somehow a reflection on the government alone only tends to reinforce that point.
Witness the scepticism, in contrast to the usually friendly banter, in the questions to Dutton in his regular morning television slot on the Nine Network’s Today program.
“What in the world makes you think you would have made any difference here?” Karl Stevanovic asked the opposition leader.
Had Dutton called Trump? Stevanovic wanted to know.
“I would suggest that it doesn’t matter who the PM is at the moment. In the cold light of day, this guy would rather do deals with Russia, than us,” he continued, amid weak protests from Dutton that it would all be very different if it was Dutton calling Trump, rather than Albanese.
The fact that it was Dutton who seemed more under pressure this week than the prime minister was a telling marker that there has been a noticeable shift in the dynamics in domestic politics.
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Lack of policy detail
Over at News Corp, The Australian’s commentators have made the startling discovery that the opposition doesn’t have any substantive policies for economic reform. The national broadsheet was even reporting disquiet among Dutton’s colleagues this week that the Coalition really needed to put some substantive policies out into the public domain, lest the Labor Party just concentrate on attacking Dutton’s personality.
Dutton has been on the back foot. As he should be. At most we are seven weeks from polling day.
When he was asked this week whether it was “fair to say that you keep some of your powder dry until the campaign proper”, Dutton responded that the “prime minister will have his budget, he’ll call an election straight away, or he’ll wait until the 10th or the 17th of May, we’ll see. There’s plenty of time for us to make our announcements in due course”.
Seriously. That is what he said.
“We’ll make careful, considered statements and positions in relation to policy, which we’ve been working on over the last two and a half years,” Dutton continued.
“We’ve matured those policies ready to a point where they’re ready to announce, but we’ll announce them at a time of our choosing.”
What about the public’s right to know about all these policies?
The Coalition’s one really big policy — spending $600 billion of taxpayers money on a nuclear power industry which won’t come on stream for decades — has literally disappeared without trace.
References to the nuclear component of the Coalition’s energy policy were missing from statements by the opposition leader and his energy spokesman Ted O’Brien.
“We have to have a balanced and sensible energy system and if we do that we can bring downward pressure on energy prices,” Dutton said on Thursday.
“At the next election, Australians face a clear choice: another three years of soaring power bills and energy chaos under Labor, or a real plan to deliver cheap, clean and consistent energy under the Coalition,” O’Brien said in a statement.
You would think they weren’t proud of their big call.
Dutton defends policy plans
Defending his policy record, Dutton declared that the Coalition was “taking the biggest policy to an election than any Coalition has done before us, even during the time of John Hewson’s leadership of the Liberal Party”.
Some of us were actually here when Hewson launched Fightback! a 347- page document (plus equally large supplementary pages) outlining all his policy plans ahead of the 1993 election: the antithesis of the Dutton policy-free zone.
Let’s give the opposition leader the benefit of the doubt and presume that he has something equally detailed to release once the election is called, despite three years in which the Coalition has taken the concept of a ‘small target’ to new levels.
Either he does have a lot of policies, and thinks it is okay to release them at a time when voters only have a couple of weeks to take them in, or he actually doesn’t have any major policies, and thinks no-one will notice.
Neither is a particularly good strategy, particularly in an environment in which minority government still appears the mostly likely outcome, and with the polling tide currently ebbing on Dutton and the Coalition.
Whoever wants to form a government will have to not just strike deals on particular policy positions but persuade cross-bench MPs that they know what they are doing, and have thought things through.
This was ultimately not something Tony Abbott could do with the crossbench in 2010. His lack of policy detail, and the Coalition’s cavalier approach to accounting in its policy documents, were as important in Labor winning support to form government as any policy proposals it had on offer.
Dutton said this week that “I’d just say to all Australians, look at what a government or a political party does, not what they say they will do”.
When it comes to releasing its policy positions, he should really take his own advice.
Laura Tingle is 7.30’s chief political correspondent.
