U.S. President Donald Trump has imposed tariffs on every country in the world, but few could feel as betrayed as Australia. Greens leader Adam Bandt, who together with other minor parties and independents holds the balance of power in Parliament, was unequivocal in his response to Wednesday’s announcement.
“End AUKUS,” Bandt posted on X.
Though only levied at a “baseline” rate of 10 percent—the minimum imposed on all nations by the United States—Trump’s tariffs have upended a roughly 70-year-old formal alliance between the two nations as well as an even longer friendship.
The AUKUS agreement, a long-term deal for the purchase of U.S.- and U.K.-made submarines by Australia, has come under particular scrutiny. The Greens have opposed the trilateral security partnership since it was struck in 2021, while Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, of the center-left Labor Party, and opposition leader Peter Dutton, of the center-right Liberal Party, have remained firm in a bipartisan stance supporting the deal.
Now, with only one month to go before national elections—and with polls showing a close race—Bandt’s position is rapidly entering the mainstream.
Australia’s reaction to Trump’s vast global tariffs is a case study in how they will reshape geopolitics. At the near-literal antipode of Washington, D.C., Trump is very much on the ballot—and Australia’s core security relationship hangs in the balance.
Independent Sen. Jacqui Lambie is the kind of politician whom journalists love to describe as a firebrand, known for her shaky grasp of sharia law and her unerring populist barometer. Under other circumstances, the far-right Lambie might be a Trump ally. In this timeline, she’s ready to give two fingers to Washington.
Speaking to the national broadcaster after Trump’s announcement, Lambie pointed indignantly to the ongoing presence of 2,500 U.S. Marines stationed in Australia’s northern city of Darwin since 2012. “You can tell them there’ll be no rotations after this one,” Lambie said. “They can get straight off home soil.”
How you detect the tectonic plates really moving is the fact that even the Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper the Australian wants to shake things up.
“[W]e are not even remotely a bad trading partner with the US,” fulminated the paper’s chief international correspondent, Cameron Stewart, shortly after the announcement. The tariffs, Stewart wrote, were “further evidence, if any was needed, that Trump pays little or no heed to the notion of alliances, loyalty or friendship.”
Speaking of friends—Albanese had tried to directly appeal to the U.S. president to secure an exemption. On the eve of the announcement, Albanese posted on Instagram that he was dining with golf star Greg Norman, who had passed Trump’s number onto then-Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull when Trump first won the presidency in 2016.
After Trump described Australians as a “wonderful people” in his April 2 speech announcing the tariffs yet ultimately denied them the exemption that Albanese sought, the prime minister conceded to reporters on Thursday that the tariffs were “not the act of a friend.”
Albanese chuckled as he noted that the Australian external territory of Norfolk Island, with a population of 2,188 people, had been hit with a tariff rate of 29 percent.
Trump’s team appears to have calculated the levies by dividing the trade deficit in goods by the country’s exports to the U.S., then halving the result. In instances where the result was low or the United States actually had a trade surplus, a 10 percent minimum was imposed. The administration also appears to have used an eccentric list of countries and territories that includes uninhabited islands and U.S. bases.
While the United States runs a trade surplus with Australia as a whole, Norfolk happens to export considerably more than it imports. Thursday’s interview wasn’t the first time the prime minister has deployed a wry, dejected humor in dealings with Trump, but he’s now under pressure to adopt a more aggressive posture.
Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, former Liberal Party staffer Niki Savva urged the leaders of both major parties to “go in hard against him.” She added, “How will Trump punish us? By scrapping AUKUS? Please. Make our day.”
Dutton, the Liberal Party leader, is in an even trickier position than Albanese. The former police officer-turned-conservative politician likely thought that he could ride a trans-Pacific MAGA wave to Australia’s top job.
Savva has called the strategy “aping Trump,” and it worked until it didn’t. Last year, Albanese’s numbers were dire, and Dutton led in polls with an unabashedly nationalist campaign message. As recently as two weeks ago, the Liberal leader was floating the idea of holding a referendum on the possibility of deporting dual citizens convicted of serious crimes, and he’s sought to ignite a culture war by accusing academics and teachers of pushing “woke agendas.” Neither are issues Australians say they’re most concerned about. (That list is topped by the cost-of-living crisis.) Lately, though, Dutton’s Trump-style politics have come to feel toxic, not just irrelevant, to many voters.
In a poll released on March 4 by the Australia Institute, more Australians cited Trump as a threat to world peace than Russian President Vladimir Putin or Chinese President Xi Jinping, and more respondents preferred a more independent foreign policy than a closer alliance with the United States.
A more recent survey found that Australians have scaled up their concerns about Trump since he took office, with 60 percent saying his election has been bad for Australia, up from 40 percent in November 2024.
That swing away from Trump surely accounts for Dutton’s waning electoral fortunes. There’s a reason that one of the more successful memes of this election cycle, created by union groups, is Dutton’s face superimposed on Trump’s. As Labor’s share of the prospective primary vote has climbed steadily over the past few weeks, the party is projected to hold on to government—mirroring a similar turnaround in Canada, which is also due to hold elections soon. There, new Prime Minister Mark Carney is tipped to beat his Trump-loving conservative opponent in an election defined by fury toward the United States.
Australians’ aversion to the U.S. president is partly a matter of style; its voters have historically recoiled from polarizing figures. The country’s system of compulsory and preferential voting, where the second choice of many can beat the first choice of some, breeds cautious leaders whose electoral success comes from repelling the least amount of people.
More significantly, there’s a visceral sense of abandonment by Australia’s big and powerful friend.
“In many cases, the friend is worse than the foe,” Trump opined in his April 2 speech, and on this point, Australians would be inclined to agree with him. Aside from running afoul of a free trade agreement that has been in place since 2005, a common talking point against the imposition of U.S. tariffs has been that the two countries have fought side by side in every major conflict since the First World War.
A feeling of camaraderie with the United States cultivated over decades has thus far allowed the AUKUS submarine deal to sail under the radar. Case in point: When the Albanese government sent $500 million to Washington as part of the deal in February, the payment passed largely without comment. If it felt a little like protection money, then at least the protection was coming from a fail-safe ally.
Sure, it was jarring when Trump appeared not to know about AUKUS when he was asked about it at an Oval Office presser in late February. Maybe he misunderstood and thought that the question was about “August”? And U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had made encouraging noises earlier that month, such as when he confirmed that “the president is very aware” of the partnership.
February, though, is ancient history. Previously, the only former prime minister willing to break ranks with the Australian national security establishment and speak out against the agreement—estimated to cost Australia about $3 billion over just its first four years—was former Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating, who left office in 1996. Keating has long advocated for the nation to break with the United States to forge closer ties in Asia, especially with China, which itself is fiercely opposed to the AUKUS deal.
But two weeks ago, Turnbull—the former Liberal Party prime minister—branded AUKUS a “terrible deal” for Australia.
“The most likely outcome of the AUKUS pillar one is that we will end up with no submarines of our own,” Turnbull said.
It is significant that ideological foes now agree that AUKUS is a waste of money. And if Albanese does win the May election and holds onto power, he will need to address this groundswell of antagonism toward the United States—and AUKUS—head-on.
Trump’s tariffs appear to be reviving the fortunes of left-leaning incumbents in countries that were, until recently, aligned with the United States. The geopolitical aftershocks of his presidency will last well beyond their tenures.
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