It’s clear that going cap in hand to Trump, asking for tariff exemptions, doesn’t usually play well. Australia is one of the very few countries with which the US has a positive trade balance, and that’s just on goods – it is even more unbalanced when services are brought into consideration.
The US appears to be in the process a beating up friends and allies, with Canada probably the worst example, while cosying up to Russia. We need to lead our politicians and begin to substitute our reliance on US goods and services as soon as possible. The early consumer focus should be on the US conglomerates that visibly support Trump, including Apple, Alphabet/Google, Microsoft, Meta and Tesla – most of whom just happen to be very poor citizens when it comes to paying tax in Australia. Would you believe that in 2022 – 2023 Apple paid tax at the rate of 1.48% on revenue in Australia of $9.3B, while Microsoft paid tax of 1.9% on revenue of $6.3B.
Meanwhile, moving away from these companies involves actions like closing accounts with Meta, governments and Australian companies not advertising on their platforms, moving away from Microsoft products, including Windows and cloud services, and not replacing your Apple devices and services, in favour of goods and services from Europe, the UK and Canada, Japan and Korea. We also need to reconsider our addiction to US based streaming services, hard … but doable.
These US companies have benefited from US international financial dominance, which has made it difficult to ensure that they pay reasonable amounts of tax. One result of America’s belligerence and isolationism should be greater freedom to tax these companies fairly and reject some of the US’s overly stringent restrictions in terms of intellectual property which are included in Australia’s free trade agreement with the US. Prior to the Agreement Australia had a copyright term of 50 years after the author’s death, the Agreement changed it to 70 years, and a number of provisions weakened the operation of the PBS and impeded access to generic medicines – fundamentally as a consequence of pressure from US pharma companies.
It can be assumed that the US will at some point seek to disrupt the PBS – an Australian institution established by a referendum in Australia in the 1940s. This should be rejected – any move to anything like the US health system is an anathema to Australians – and political suicide to any enabling party in Australia.
