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.
