Friday 16 November 2018

Australia’s Trump Lite is overseas seeing what other trade opportunities he can wreck



The Australian, 13 November 2018, p.2:

Scott Morrison has mounted the strongest defence of any allied leader so far of Donald Trump’s trade policies, denying that Washington has turned protectionist because of its imposition of tariffs on China.

“The US wants to see greater trade and more open trade and they want to see it on better terms,” the Prime Minister told The Australian in an interview in his Sydney office. “It is yet to be established that the US is pursuing a protectionist policy.” 

Mr Morrison said he did not agree with the protectionist ­interpretation of the administration’s trade policy.

Mr Morrison leaves today on a trip to Singapore and Papua New Guinea for APEC and ASEAN-related summits, during which he will meet US Vice-President Mike Pence, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and a range of regional leaders.

He gave a distinctive reading of US trade policy.

“If I could summarise US policy, it is that what they’ve been doing until now has not produced that (freer trade) so there should not be an expectation that they’ll continue to do things the way they have been.” But Mr Morrison makes a controversial judgment: “That doesn’t mean their objective has changed — their objective being a more open, freer trading system around the world, with a rules-based order, and everybody ­respecting those rules and those rules not being stacked against any one group.

“They have particular views about how things affect them, then there are other issues around intellectual property and so on where we have said there are some real issues here and things that need to be resolved.” Stressing that it was too early to conclude that the US had made a long-term switch to protectionism, he said: “You can only judge it on the results, not the rhetoric, so let’s see.” Mr Morrison cited the trade deals the Trump administration had done with Canada and Mex­ico and said many commentators saw early Trump trade moves against those nations as indicating long-term protectionism, but the result was new trade deals.

Mr Morrison also stressed that his government was not taking a position for or against the US or China in their trade dispute: “We’re not really judging either party in this because we trade with both and we’ve been successful (with both), whether it’s staying clear of US tariffs on steel and aluminium or with China, which is our biggest trading partner.

“We maintain a pragmatic ­balance.” This is Mr Morrison’s first Asian summit season, but soon after the APEC and East Asia summits he will attend a G20 summit, where he will meet the US President.

Early yesterday, in an interview with David Speers on Sky TV, he slightly misstated government policy when he said definitively that territory in the South China Sea was not Chinese territory.

He cleared this up in a series of later interviews, confirming that Canberra does not take a position on the merits of respective nations’ claims to territory in the South China Sea……

BACKGROUND

Crikey, 12 November 2018:

Morrison’s “stop asking questions from the Labor Party” diktat to the ABC has taken Australia one step closer to a political discourse dominated by Trumpian semiotics of “fake news” and “enemies of the people”.

Like Trump, Morrison’s aim was to undermine the media — and particularly the ABC — in the minds of that mythical creature, the Liberal Party base, and help out News Corp on the way through.

It came in the same week that Trump ramped-up his own war on journalists: revoking White House clearance from CNN’s Jim Acosta, dismissing another reporter’s “stupid questions” and calling a third a “loser”.

For a journalist, Morrison’s insult is greater. Trump’s name-calling is straight out of the primary school playground; Morrison’s crack goes to the heart of personal and craft integrity…..

The “journalist as enemy of the people” trope is perhaps the most institutionally damaging part of Trumpian semiotics adopted by Morrison. But it’s not the only one.
He seems to be aiming for the Trump look, too. There’s the now-ubiquitous base-ball cap, with Australian branding substituting “Make America Great Again”. There’s the single thumbs-up to say “we’re in this together” to go along with the trademark Trump two handed thumbs-up.

The social media of choice — multi-platform video snippets — similarly taunt with a “laugh-at-me or laugh-with-me, but notice me” Trump sensibility.

His prime ministerial speech patterns reflect both the Trumpian blather of his opening press statement (“a fair go for those who have a go”) interspersed with the cut-through insults: “Bill Shorten is union bred, union fed, union led.” Morrison’s insults do have somewhat more political content than the personalised “Lyin Ted”, and “Little Marco” that Trump pulled out during the 2016 election. 

Policy commitments tend to be the same vague generalities (“we’re gonna fix this”) and he uses the same thought bubble technique (Jerusalem, anyone?) to focus the debate on him, for good or ill.

Meanwhile, Trump has shown he’s willing to learn from Australia, as he famously suggested in his “you’re worse than I am” compliment to Turnbull. The “migrant caravan” that dominated right-wing discourse in the lead-up to the US mid-terms would have chimed in Australian minds with the familiar sound:  Tampa, Manus, Nauru.

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