Albo confirms ‘scheduled' Trump meet
Anthony Albanese has said he 'expects' to meet US President Donald Trump on the sidelines of the G7 Summit, confirming the pair have a 'scheduled' meeting on Tuesday.
Following growing pressure for Australia to secure a face-to-face meeting with the US leader, the Prime Minister said he would 'obviously' raise the issue of tariffs, the importance of the AUKUS security pact and 'will have a discussion as two friends should'.
The US' call for Australia to increase its defence spending from current levels of 2 per cent of GDP to 3 per cent, will likely also dominate conversations.
'Obviously, there are issues that the US president is dealing with at the moment, but I expect that we will be able to have a constructive engagement,' he said, speaking from The Spheres, Amazon's Seattle headquarters, on Sunday morning.
'I look forward to building on the very constructive phone conversations that we've had on the three occasions that we've had the opportunity to talk.' Anthony Albanese confirmed he had a scheduled meeting with US President Donald Trump on Tuesday. NewsWire Credit: Supplied
Speaking to the greater economic relationship between Australia and the US, Mr Albanese said it was 'important to recognise' that Australia has a trade surplus with the states both in terms of goods and services.
'We want to grow the economic relationship between our two countries, and I'm sure that when I have the opportunity to have discussions with President Trump, we will speak about the important economic relationship between our two countries, which is in the interests of both Australia and the United States.'
While he wouldn't 'make declarations' on negotiations, Mr Albanese said he would 'put forward Australia's interests respectfully'.
As it stands, Australia has been slugged with a baseline tariff of 10 per cent, plus a 25 per cent levy on aluminium and 50 per cent tariff on steel imports.
'It is also in the interests of the United States for Australia to be treated appropriately. Tariffs across the board, of course, impose an increased cost on the purchases of those goods and services,' Mr Albanese said.
'I will enter into those discussions constructively, the discussions that I've previously had with President Trump were constructive, but those 10 per cent tariff supports have been the minimum … that have been applied across the board.'
Mr Albanese, who will spend a night in Seattle before travelling to Canada to attend the G7 Summit, is also set to speak to business leaders from BHP Ventures, quantum computing leader Diraq, Trellis Health, Airwallex and Anthropic, where he will highlight the importance of 'free and fair trade' arrangements between the two countries.
Appearing alongside Amazon Web Services (AWS) chief executive Matt Garman on Saturday morning local time, the pair announced that the tech giant would increase its investment of data centre infrastructure to $20bn between 2025 to 2020.
As it stands AWS operates three data centre zones across Melbourne and Sydney. Anthony Albanese spoke alongside AWS chief executive Matt Garman on Saturday morning, local time. Jessica Wang/ NewsWire Credit: Supplied
Mr Albanese said it was an example of how the private sector growing Australia's economy and boosting productivity – a key goal in Labor's second term.
'We know that AI is so important, and this investment will certainly support complex AI and supercomputing applications as well,' he said.
'It will boost Australia's economic growth, our resilience and our productivity, it will accelerate the development of Australia's growing data centre infrastructure and support technology adoption by Australian businesses.'
Mr Garman said the new funding commitment was the 'largest investment ever announced by a global technology provider in Australia'.
He added that AWS already had a significant presence in Australia, providing cloud hosting services for CommBank, Canva and Atlassian.
'Today in AWS, the demand that we're seeing for cloud computing and AI is massive, and it's remaking every single industry out there in the world, from banking to healthcare to retail … and we estimate the technology over the next decade will drive over $600bn increases in Australia's GDP by the year 2030.'
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