US lobby groups urge tariff retaliation against Australia's ‘socialised medicine'
As the Albanese government seeks to navigate uncertainty over the US president, Donald Trump's shifting plans for trade tariffs, campaigners from the powerful US Chamber of Commerce and the National Taxpayers Union have urged the White House to push back on countries that use price controls or 'undervalue American innovation'.
Trump's trade representative, Jamieson Greer, has been charged with collecting evidence of countries 'freeloading on American-financed innovation' around the world, part of America's growing tariff campaign.
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Chamber of Commerce vice-president John Murphy has used the review to criticise slow approval times and rejection rates for new drug applications to Australia's $18bn Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. He said the average approval time of 32 months put Australia well behind other OECD countries, with only about a third of new medicines launched between 2014 and 2023 available on the PBS, compared with 87% for US consumers.
Murphy said Australia had no system to notify drug patent holders of applications by rival companies for generic drugs entering the market, meaning public announcements sometimes prompted court action.
The chamber also highlighted measures to boost onshore production of mRNA vaccines used during the Covid-19 pandemic as creating an 'uneven playing field' for US companies, and said mandated price reductions tied to listings dates on the PBS devalued intellectual property and undermined medical research.
'US-manufactured products should be allowed to compete on an equal basis with Australian-produced goods, consistent with the WTO [World Trade Organization] and US-Australia Free Trade Agreement,' he said.
The National Taxpayers Union, a conservative a lobby group, called consumer drug price controls in countries such as Australia 'socialised medicine' and criticised efforts by governments to push ahead with the OECD's rewrite of key international tax rules.
Australia is pursuing the plan, which includes a global minimum 15% tax rate for multinational companies, as well new taxes on tech firms on the basis of where they earn revenue.
Research and development tax concessions in Australia, France and Spain were described as conferring advantages to local firms 'that the United States is hard-pressed to match'.
American pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly hit out at favourable R&D settings in Australia for threatening biomedical innovation and patient care. It said since 2012, 94% of new cancer medicines have been available in the US, compared to just 39% in Australia.
The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America used its submission to urge Trump to 'leverage ongoing trade negotiations' to weaken the PBS, something Labor has ruled out.
In Australia, prices for pharmaceutical medicines are capped at $31.60 if listed on the PBS. A 2024 report by research organisation Rand found that US drug prices were, on average, about 370% higher than in Australia and 278% above the OECD average.
Trump said on Monday AEST that the White House planned to start sending letters to US trading partners this week, dictating new tariff rates.
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Wednesday's planned deadline for the end of a 90-day pause on Trump's retaliatory tariffs appears to have been pushed back to 1 August, even as Trump said he expected a slew of deals to be made this week.
Trump in April had announced a 10% base tariff rate on most countries and additional duties ranging up to 50%. The new start date has left importers uncertain.
The US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said key trading partners would receive letters warning if deals were not made, they would 'boomerang' back to the 2 April tariff rates.
The Albanese government believes Australia's 10% rate will stick, and no negotiations on a further deal have taken place.
Labor frontbencher Matt Thistlethwaite told Sky that Labor wanted the tariffs removed.
'But our expectation is that the tariffs will remain. Australia's fared better than any other nation in the world.'
Liberal senator Maria Kovacic called for clarity from the White House.
'The reason we don't know what is going on is because our government and our prime minister don't know, because they don't have the strength of relationship with the United States that they should have.'
On Friday the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, said he expected Australia's 10% rate to remain in place.
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The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Superman is super woke? How politics play into the new man of steel
Superman Woke! Variations on that headline splashed across all manner of non-Daily Planet websites this week in advance of a new Superman movie reboot, specifically the comments of writer-director James Gunn, who casually characterized the character as an immigrant and, as such, telling the 'story of America' in an interview. This rankled rightwingers including the former TV Superman Dean Cain, who acknowledged Superman as an immigrant but blanched at the idea of actively associating that as an American value, noting that 'there have to be limits'. Meanwhile, the former Trump lackey Kellyanne Conway, now a Fox News host, characterized the movie she hasn't seen as an ideological lecture, and added her supposed anger that the movie's star, David Corenswet, elided the old 'truth, justice and the American way' Superman slogan in another interview (referring to 'truth, justice, all that good stuff'). For those attempting to keep track: people involved with a Superman movie shouldn't attempt to evoke America, except when they should. Actually, for those keeping even closer track, the 'American way' bit was a phrase added to the radio version of Superman during the second world war, and further popularized by the 1950s TV show. It lived on primarily in reruns of that show, didn't appear in the comics until 1991, and has never been particularly central to the character in his original medium (or any of the movies, even). This is all to say that the reading of Superman as an immigrant is so commonplace, so arguably a part of the plain old surface text of the character, that it's even harder to buy any ginned-up outrage than usual. At best, it's a byproduct of suppressed guilt over the cruel and unusual immigration policies favored by anyone dumb enough to complain that this a 'woke' version of a 90-year-old superhero. In fact, the phoney outrage and predictions of boycott from people who don't go to the movies anyway could be a gag straight from the movie itself. It's one of plenty of real-world parallels in Gunn's movie. Most of them fall into the blockbuster realm of vagueness that makes it hard to tell if it was inspired by real events or just unsuccessfully sidestepping from evoking one international crisis straight into evoking another. (More on that in a moment.) But the most obviously first-hand quasi-political experiences Gunn draws upon all have to do with social media: this is a Superman whose weaknesses include Kryptonite, Lex Luthor-engineered software that anticipates his every punch, and … reading the comments. During one argument, Lois Lane needles her superpowered boyfriend by telling him she's seen him looking through certain hashtags guaranteed to frustrate and enrage even the virtuous child of Kansas farms who still says 'golly!' on the regular. This makes sense: James Gunn does not have experience in geopolitics, but he sure has experience online. The film-maker was semi-canceled over edgelord-y tweets (unearthed, in perfect discourse fashion, by rightwingers infuriated by his left-leaning politics); fired from the third Guardians of the Galaxy movie; and eventually rehired when Disney realized that maybe cast and fan loyalty was worth more than manufactured outrage. But in his between-Guardians downtime, Gunn made a Suicide Squad sequel for the previous DC regime, essentially auditioning for his current job. In some ways, he owes his stewardship of Superman and DC in general to the vexations of life online. So if it's a little cringe-y to hear about Superman glancing through social media, or for Gunn to go out of his way to show Lex Luthor training an army of monkeys to flood the zone with mean tweets, it's also a funny, oddly whimsical way of acknowledging our contemporary world. (Plus, remember that Clark Kent works in media, even if his newspaper still publishes a print edition.) It's certainly more surefooted than the movie's actual politics, which go further than the likes of Captain America: Brave New World but still fall short of anything more complicated than the actual thrust of Gunn's interview. (Which was that kindness is, in fact, good.) The immigrant stuff, first of all, is in the movie but not especially prominent. A plot turn involving Superman's parents could even be read as accidentally xenophobic; after all, if you're trading on the message that it doesn't matter where an immigrant comes from once assimilated into our culture, doesn't that by definition cast aspersions on other countries (or in this case, planets) and elevate whatever 'our' culture is? That's obviously not Gunn's intent in positioning Superman as an immigrant figure; he wants to elicit the empathy for outsiders that we've all felt at one time or another. The logical stumble is more a sign of a metaphor that isn't fit for front-to-back, one-to-one interpretation; that's not a problem on its own. More interesting is the story's offscreen inciting incident, where Superman intervenes in the affairs of two fictional countries. When the movie begins, Superman has recently stopped Boravia, which is led by a blustery despot who comes across like an eastern European Trump, from invading neighboring Jarhanpur. The latter has struck some viewers as coded Middle Eastern, implying parallels between Israel and Palestine, though in the comic books (and based on the leader's accent, here too) the countries are actually somewhere in Europe. That is to say, it looks more akin to Russia invading Ukraine, though Gunn has said he didn't have any specific real-life turmoil in mind when he concocted the scenario. The issue is really more interventionism: should Superman have acted unilaterally in stopping Boravia (and, indeed, threatening its leader with reprisal if he tries it again)? Lois Lane isn't so sure, bringing up the repressive nature of past Jarhanpur governments (and in turn bringing to mind Israel's attacks on Iran, though that particular conflict was in the news well after this movie was written, shot and probably almost or entirely finished). One of the most heartening things about Superman is that Lois's objections inspire a full conversation between her and Superman, in the guise of an 'interview' to make up for the fact that most of Superman's press is self-directed through Clark Kent. For a little while, the movie seems ready to dig into the genuine strife faced by a mega-powerful being who therefore has the ability to shape the world. Stopping people in another country from dying seems ethical. But what about issuing de facto press releases disguised as a real journalism? Of course, all of these questions are in the realm of hypothetical, so the movie mostly just invents hypothetical solutions that turn on the fact that Superman is, in fact, inherently trustworthy and moral. Lucky for everyone, huh? Then again, getting too far into the issue of whether Superman 'should' help people starts to look a bit too much like the Zack Snyder version that audiences and critics had such mixed-at-best feelings toward. Gunn wants Superman to be a bigger-tent affair than that, and it's an understandable impulse. He's not the first superhero character, but he's arguably the first one to achieve something resembling global ubiquity. That's going to lead to some varying interpretations. Limiting him to specific politics makes no more sense than keeping a world-saving god within Metropolis city limits. Yet in a weird way, the buffoonish outrage over Superman's immigration status has only served to highlight a void in the movie's broader emotional resonance. It's a sweet-natured movie that ends on a genuinely emotional note – it might particularly resonate for those with adoptive parents, another Superman mainstay – but misses the opportunity to make a more explicit parallel in the way Superman has emigrated both to the United States in particular, but to Earth in general. His global citizenship is more of a feelgood given than a powerful duality, and a Superman that truly grappled with our ability to see beyond national boundaries might have felt like a true update of the character for a new century, rather than another tacit plea for kindness. We have Paddington for that. Shouldn't Superman be able to lift something a little heavier?
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
As Texas cleans up, ex-staffers say Fema has ‘eroded capacity' for multiple disasters
As the cleanup continues from this month's torrential rain storms and flooding in Texas that left more than 120 dead, recently departed officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) say the organization is dangerously underresourced and overstretched in the event of further natural catastrophes. A mass staff exodus, plunging morale and a loss of key leaders has left the main US disaster-relief organization ill-equipped to cope with an anticipated deadly spate of storms in the current hurricane season, former agency insiders say. Fema's weakness, exacerbated by grant cuts imposed by the Trump administration and the loss of institutional knowledge in strategic leadership positions, will be exposed if the nation is faced with more than one disaster simultaneously, according to Michael Coen, the agency's former chief of staff. In an interview, Coen – who left his post in January after Donald Trump took office – said the officials at Fema had been preparing contingency plans that would enable the agency to meet the demands of hurricane season, which generally runs from early June until the end of November, with fewer resources. 'They understand that they don't have the resources they've had in past years, whether it's funding or even some contracts have lapsed,' he said. 'They are trying to make decisions so that they can handle multiple events at one time.' But since Trump's inauguration, the agency has seen an estimated 2,000 departures through resignations or retirements, which may have rendered it incapable of coping with the widespread carnage likely to be wreaked by a succession of tropical storms. 'I'm concerned that Fema is going to be at a disadvantage because they don't have the resources to respond to the disasters we know could happen, which could be two or three concurrent disasters at the same time,' said Coen. 'Fema has eroded capacity since President Trump became president. Staff have departed. There have been cuts to grant programs and they are going to be running into a financial challenge with the disaster relief fund, because the president hasn't requested supplemental funding from Congress.' Coen – a disaster relief career official who was also Fema's chief of staff during Barack Obama's presidency – said the cuts could mean the agency running out of funds to respond to disasters by the end of this month. 'Fema is currently supporting the state of Texas with the flooding and the urban search and rescue. But if in a week or two they also have to respond to a hurricane in the Gulf coast or an earthquake on the west coast, Fema is not going to be able to meet the expectations of the American people.' The concerns over Fema's state of readiness come amid signs that Trump may have had a change of heart about the agency's future after months of signaling that he favored its abolition. Last month, he said the administration planned to 'phase out' Fema after the current hurricane season to put more responsibility on individual states to respond to disasters. He previously described the agency – established in 1979 by Jimmy Carter with the goal of coordinating the US government's response to disasters – as 'not good' and said he would 'recommend that Fema go away'. But ahead of Trump's Friday visit to the worst-hit Texas flood areas, White House officials indicated that eliminating Fema entirely was no longer under consideration, the Washington Post reported. The newspaper quoted an unnamed official as saying changes would probably amount to 'rebranding' the agency while stressing the leadership role of the states in disaster response. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary – who has overall responsibility for Fema and has chaired a review council looking into the agency's future – said in the wake of the Texas floods that Fema would be 'eliminated as it exists today and remade into a responsive agency', a hardline stance that nonetheless stopped short of abolition. Coen said the Texas floods had proved Fema's worth: 'This flood is a defining moment and brings clarity for the necessity of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Fema is an essential agency for the federal government to support states and support the American people in their greatest time of need.' But he said grant cuts had rendered it less effective and may have caused 'an unnecessary loss of life' in the Guadalupe River area of the Texas Hill Country, the worst-hit flood region. 'One of the grant programs they cut was the Building Resilient Infrastructure Communities, which was a program that would have funded things like the siren system to line a river like the [Guadalupe] in Kerr county,' he said. 'Not that many people needed to lose their lives if more mitigation measures had been put in place. With the president cutting a grant program that provides federal funding to increase mitigation in the country, it only is foreboding for the future on what could happen to other communities if they don't mitigate and they don't have access to federal funds.' The picture of an agency undermined by the Trump administration's hostility was corroborated by a former mid-level Fema official, who told the Guardian that staff had left because they felt disrespected. Sign up to This Week in Trumpland A deep dive into the policies, controversies and oddities surrounding the Trump administration after newsletter promotion 'It's no secret that a lot of high-level leaders have left the agency,' the ex-official said. 'It's clear that Fema has lost a lot of leadership capability.' Among those who have left are Tony Robinson, who was Fema's head administrator for the region that includes Texas, as well as his deputy. Also recently departing was Robert Samaan, the administrator for the region that covers Florida and several other states in the hurricane-prone south-east. 'Those are two of the three most critical regional administrators for hurricane season, and for them to leave at this time leaves people shaken for sure,' the former staffer said. 'The lack of experienced leadership is certainly going to hamstring efforts. It's not to say that there aren't other good leaders who will step up. But LinkedIn is littered with people whose names I knew who have left.' The departure of 16 senior executives was announced on a single day in May. Compounding the problem is the damage to the morale of those remaining from what insiders say is the scornful attitude of Noem and Fema's acting administrator, David Richardson, a former marine artillery officer with no previous experience in disaster management. Richardson, who has been in the post since May, caused a stir among senior staff when he said during a briefing that he did not know there was a hurricane season. It was unclear if the comments were meant as a joke. Richardson was installed after Noem ousted his predecessor, Cameron Hamilton, after he told a congressional hearing that he did not favor Fema's abolition. The new administrator also threatened to 'run right over' any staff members who resisted reforms. 'I, and I alone in Fema, speak for Fema. I'm here to carry out the president's intent for Fema,' he reportedly said. Coen affirmed the picture of staff leaving due to fears for Fema's future. 'The reason many employees have departed since January 20 is because they had a fear that they were going to lose their job,' he said. 'Also, they didn't feel respected by the current administration. The current employees still there are supporting each other, but if they feel they are not getting support and understanding of how much they sacrifice when they go to disasters, it does have an impact on their mental health and wellbeing.' Noem, meanwhile, has drawn criticism for issuing a decree requiring that any expenditures or contracts worth $100,000 or more are submitted to her for prior approval – a requirement that critics say could impede rapid disaster response. 'Typically, pre-Trump, a decision like that would come at a much lower level than the secretary of homeland security so you could get out and mobilize,' the former official said. 'It's just unconscionable that you would centralize a decision like that, [which] truly, on reflection, would have led to the loss of life, or at least the loss of the ability to find the remains of the victims.' The Department of Homeland Security has publicly defended the directive as necessary to root out 'waste, fraud and abuse' and deliver 'accountability' to US taxpayers.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
‘Alligator Alcatraz' showcases Trump's surreal brand of stylized cruelty
The concentration camp seems to have been erected largely for the sake of a photoshoot. Florida's governor, Ron DeSantis – eager to rehabilitate his reputation among the Maga right in the wake of his humiliating and disastrous 2024 presidential run – has been among the most eager foot soldiers of the Trump administration's mass deportation agenda. He has dedicated funding to capturing migrants and holding them at facilities like the Krome detention center in Miami, where dramatic overcrowding, the absence of air conditioning, rapidly spreading disease, and a shortage of food, sanitation, and medical care have contributed to an outcry among immigrants imprisoned there and the deaths of multiple detainees, including a 29-year-old man from Honduras, a 44-year-old man from Ukraine and a 75-year-old Cuban national who had lived in the United States since his teens. For his efforts, DeSantis has received praise from Donald Trump and the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem. This kind of abuse of immigrants – rounding them up, cramming them into detention centers that are little more than cages, and letting them die there of heat, illness or neglect – is exactly the kind of policy that aligns with the Trump administration's aims. And so it should not be surprising that the initial proposal for the so-called 'Alligator Alcatraz' – a small tent city on an airstrip in the Florida Everglades that has been erected as a concentration camp for immigrants captured by Trump's forces – came from within the DeSantis administration. The camp was first proposed in a video posted to X by Florida's DeSantis-appointed Republican attorney general, James Uthmeier. Uthmeier, who has mimicked Trump officials in ignoring judicial orders in order to carry out deportations, coined a name for his proposed camp that seemed especially designed to appeal to Trump's fantasies of high-drama, cinematic domination of his enemies. Trump has reportedly mused both about creating a moat filled with alligators along the Mexico border and about reviving Alcatraz, the former federal island prison in the San Francisco Bay which has been the subject of action movies, including a 1979 film starring Clint Eastwood and a 1996 Sean Connery vehicle, which the president has probably seen playing on cable television. In the video, Uthmeier walks along a rural airstrip, presumably the one he had earmarked as the camp site, flanked by uniformed law enforcement officers. He can be heard in a voiceover saying that immigrants, whose illegal entry into the United States is a civil violation and who often have not been convicted of any crime, will not be able to escape the facility without encountering alligators and pythons in the Florida wilderness. In another shot, a helicopter sits on the asphalt as rock music plays. Donald Trump apparently liked what he saw, because the camp was erected over the course of mere days, and Trump toured the facility on 1 July, standing in a red hat that read 'GULF OF AMERICA' before a series of chain-link cages filled with rows of bunk beds. The facility received its first prisoners the next day. Almost immediately, DeSantis's team began selling merchandise for the facility, for Trump supporters who want to advertise their enthusiasm for mass deportation. It has long been a feature of Trump's regime that displays of domination and cruelty have to be made in public, in a style of vulgar, over-the-top obviousness. Branded like a low-budget movie, the Everglades site combines the extraordinary racism and contempt for human rights of the Trump anti-immigration effort with the sleazy camp of his movement's style of masculinity. 'Alligator Alcatraz' is the kind of place the hero would have to escape from in a television show, or in a level of a video game, and its stylized cruelty is supposed to seem hyperreal, even uncanny. Perhaps this sense of scripted unreality surrounding what is in fact a concentration camp is supposed to help Trump's supporters and the rest of the American people partake in the pleasures of domination while avoiding the recognition that the horror and pain they are inflicting is real. But it is real. The camp has been open, now, for just over a week, and already one prisoner has been hospitalized, reportedly as a result of the camp's inhumane conditions. According to news reports, many of the men there were not permitted to shower for days. Broken air conditioning left men alternately freezing and sweltering in the heat. Detainees report that they are only being fed one meal a day, and that the food has been infested with maggots. There is no secure line by which the prisoners – who, again, are being detained on civil, not criminal, violations – can speak to their lawyers without being monitored. Toilets don't flush, and the facility is infested with bugs. It is not clear that the concentration camp, housed in the low-elevation swamps of south Florida, can withstand the rains and winds that are typical of the east coast's summer hurricane season. It has already flooded. Sign up to This Week in Trumpland A deep dive into the policies, controversies and oddities surrounding the Trump administration after newsletter promotion If the immigrants are kept in these conditions, more of them will die. They will die of heat, disease and exposure; they will die when heavy winds from a hurricane rip the camp's tents apart or send their metal beams flying; they will die when they are left without edible food or drinkable water for long stretches in severe weather; they will die when the stagnant human waste in the unflushed toilets and the tight quarters with scores of other immigrant strangers causes disease to spread. These are not conditions that can sustain human life, let alone human rights or dignity. For Trump and his followers, that might be the point. Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
