“Australia refuses to join Trump’s trade war with China”, the Australian Financial Review (AFR) reported on May 15 under this title that Australian Trade Minister Farrell rarely rejected the US in an exclusive interview with it, publicly stating that Australia will resist the pressure of the Trump administration of the United States and refuse to jointly pressure China on trade issues.
According to reports, Farrell said that China is Australia’s largest trading partner, and for Australia, trade with China is “10 times more important” than trade with the United States. “We don’t want to reduce trade with China, but want to have more trade with China,” he said. “We will decide how to continue to engage with China based on our national interests, not on what Americans may or may not want.”
The AFR pointed out that official data showed that Australia’s exports to China in 2023-2024 were A$212 billion, while exports to the United States were only A$37 billion.
Farrell also said that the Australian government is not in a hurry to seek tariff reductions from the Trump administration. He revealed that after the dust settled on the Australian federal parliamentary election on May 3, Australian Ambassador to the United States Kevin Rudd had held talks with US Commerce Secretary Lutnick and US Trade Representative Greer, and submitted Australia’s revised proposal to cancel tariffs. However, the Australian government “will not make a deal for the sake of making a deal.”
“We will only sign a deal if it is in the national interest. We hope to reach a good deal and are prepared to wait patiently.” Farrell said.
As part of the Trump administration’s global tariff measures, Australia’s exports to the United States are subject to a 10% base tax rate. The additional 25% tariff imposed by the United States on all imported steel and aluminum also affects Australian steel and aluminum products worth about 1 billion Australian dollars (about 630 million US dollars).
According to the AFR, Australian Prime Minister Albanese, who has just led the Labor Party to win the general election and successfully re-elected, is expected to hold his first face-to-face meeting with Trump next month, and trade issues will inevitably become the focus of the negotiations. Some experts believe that the Trump administration will then put pressure on Canberra to weaken its trade and economic ties with China in some form.
John Kunkel, senior economic adviser at the Center for American Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia, said that successive Australian governments have tried to separate trade and security issues to maintain a balance between the United States and China, but the Trump administration does not view Australia-China and Australia-US relations from the same perspective, “It is almost inevitable that the United States will make demands on us.”
In an interview with AFR, Farrell showed his appreciation for the current improvement in Australia-China relations. The report said that he emphasized that Australia-China trade has effectively recovered under the efforts of the Australian Labor Party government in the past three years. “We have stabilized the relationship between the two countries. It took us three years to restore the relationship between the two countries to the level it should be.” Farrell said.
Recently, the Trump administration’s “indiscriminate tariffs” have also pushed China-Australia trade relations closer. On April 28, the Australian Meat Industry Council (AMIC) confirmed that 10 Australian meat companies were recently approved to export sheep and goat meat to China for the first time. AMIC introduced that this is the largest expansion of Australian lamb imported into the Chinese market in many years, “quite exciting.”
Earlier, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) found on April 13 that the tariff conflict between China and the United States also brought opportunities for Australian beef exports. Statistics from the Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA) showed that Australia’s grain-fed beef exports to China increased significantly, with exports to China exceeding 20,000 tons in February and March, a surge of nearly 40% over the same period last year.