MSNBC host has meltdown over Supreme Court's birthright citizenship ruling
MSNBC host Symone Sanders Townsend has had a meltdown following the Supreme Court's ruling on birthright citizenship.
During a panel discussion on Friday, Townsend called SCOTUS's ruling 'insane' as they voted in favour of US President Donald Trump's executive order.
'I just don't, I can't believe that we are asking the question, 'Is the 14th Amendment to the Constitution constitutional?' That is what, it is crazy. And I am sorry, but people need to call, 'This is crazy,'' she said.
'They are asking us… They're asking us not to believe our own eyes and our own ears. They're asking us to go against everything that we know to be true. This is insane.'
The Supreme Court recently handed the Trump administration a major victory in its efforts to block lower courts from upending its executive orders.
The justices ruled 6-3 in favour of the Trump administration; the ruling will allow lower courts to issue injunctions but only in limited situations.
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Perth Now
an hour ago
- Perth Now
US Senate extends vote on Trump's 'big beautiful bill'
The US Senate has extended its debate on President Donald Trump's controversial budget, with the expectation of voting on the plan, which would add more than $5 trillion to the public debt. Republicans told the media that the "vote-a-rama" would begin at 9am local time on Monday (11pm AEST), the process in which lawmakers present amendments to the initiative, which contains key elements of Trump's agenda, such as tax and public spending cuts, and increased funding for defence and immigration control. It is still uncertain whether all 53 senators from Trump's party will support the bill, as it would add $US3.3 trillion ($A5.1 trillion) to the public debt within 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) now estimates, a higher estimate than the $US2.4 ($A3.7) trillion in the version approved by the House in May. Other lawmakers question the cuts to social programs such as Medicaid and food stamps because the CBO predicts that 12 million people will lose their health insurance by 2034 under the initiative, which would cut $US1.1 trillion ($A1.7 trillion) in public health policies. Among the critics is Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who resigned from his re-election bid on Sunday after publicly opposing the bill and drawing criticism from Trump. "Facts matter, people matter. The Senate's approach to Medicaid breaks promises and will push people who truly need it off Medicaid," the lawmaker said. Elon Musk, also took a swipe at the bill, which would end tax breaks for the electric vehicles that his automaker Tesla manufactures, posting on X it was "utterly insane and destructive" and "political suicide for the Republican Party". Meanwhile, Democrats displayed unified opposition by first forcing 16 hours of reading aloud of the 940-page bill and then exhausting the 10 hours of debate allotted to each party to delay the process and highlight the tax cuts for the wealthy and the budget. "Democrats are exposing on the floor through parliamentary inquiries the hypocrisy of what Republicans are trying to do here in the Senate. We are exposing how Republicans are trying to hide the true cost of their gifts to billionaires," Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said. Trump intensified his lobbying in the last week to get the Senate to approve his controversial "Big, Beautiful Bill" for signing by Friday, Independence Day. The controversy grew this week after the release of the 940-page draft currently being discussed by the Senate. It includes more cuts than those approved by the House of Representatives, particularly to social programs and tax incentives for wind and solar energy, and electric vehicles.
The Advertiser
2 hours ago
- The Advertiser
Defence spending: the art of picking the moment to panic
The United States wants Australia to spend more on its armed forces. That's the way nations talk about these things. In everyday life, things are different. I don't make up my shopping list by noting down "spend more on chicken thighs": I want to buy a particular number of chicken thighs, the number the recipe calls for. The Albanese government is standing firm in the face of American pressure, sort of, saying that we'll spend more money on our armed forces because we want to, not because you want us to, so there! Which doesn't really resolve the question of how many chicken thighs we need. It's certainly true that we're facing unprecedented challenges. In his recent Quarterly Essay "Hard new world", independent defence analyst Hugh White points out that in the Trump era the American alliance is no longer worth the paper it was never printed on (the ANZUS treaty commits the parties only to "consult[ing] together whenever in the opinion of any of them the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the parties is threatened" and to "act[ing] to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes". White concludes that Australia must stand up for itself, cancel AUKUS, and carve out its own foreign policy. Despite his differences with the government, however, he still suggests that "Australia will need to spend a lot more on defence if it wishes to manage the risk of aggression by a great power like China in the decades ahead." Various commentators have pointed out that we already spend rather a lot on our armed forces, coming in at about 11th on world rankings of dollar expenditure - more than Israel, more than Taiwan. For their payments, Taiwan gets a parade ground salute from 1,837,800 uniforms and Israel gets 642,000 (including large reserve forces in both cases). We check in at 79,990, reserves included - notably fewer. Even those critics who don't think we need to spend more on our defence don't suggest we need to spend less, but it would surely be odd if we had purely by chance ended up exactly in the Goldilocks zone. There are hints that we could do rather better. Analysis prepared for the Greens by the parliamentary library and reported by the ABC revealed that "the ranks of senior officers in the Australian military [have] almost doubled over the past 20 years, despite a steady decline in overall numbers of enlisted defence personnel". Critics - and some official reports - suggest "the Defence organisation is top- heavy, over-managed and under-led" (Michael Shoebridge, Strategic Analysis Australia) and "there are ... dangerous weaknesses in our defence capabilities" (Henry Ergas, in The Australian). Armed forces, though, are inherently difficult to manage efficiently. How do you measure the performance of an organisation that you hope is never going to be called upon to do what you would want it to be able to do? How, strategically, do you identify the threats that our forces are designed to combat, given that mentioning the names of these nations in public would move us appreciably closer to such conflicts? How, as a politician, do you cut back on the privileges of the generals without having them leak hostile reports to the media? Faced with these difficult problems, Australian ministers for defence tend to move on to another more compliant portfolio as soon as they can. Australian governments have historically retreated to arguing only about total spending, believing that the public can't cope with more than one number at a time. The other problem, of course, is productivity. Money spent on arms is, in economic terms, a dead end (although it could be said that our acquisition of warships supports our shipbuilding industry, or would, if we had one). There's not much spillover. Money invested almost anywhere else - education, research, infrastructure - would have a payoff down the track; adding more soldiers just withdraws resources from everywhere else and diminishes growth. READ MORE: The longer we can last before we arm up, the more resources we'll have when we need to. If Australia did believe that we were in actual danger of invasion, we would be spending on defence about what we spent in 1943, or 33 per cent of GDP, and we'd also be instituting conscription and rationing. The difference between 2 per cent and 33 per cent is a measure of how safe we feel when not specifically prompted to panic. The trick, of course, is picking the moment to panic. And one of the major tasks facing any Australian government is to make it absolutely clear when the answer is "not remotely yet". Our leaders are very, very bad at it. Then we need to talk about AI and its role in place of foot soldiers. That's a whole other debate. The United States wants Australia to spend more on its armed forces. That's the way nations talk about these things. In everyday life, things are different. I don't make up my shopping list by noting down "spend more on chicken thighs": I want to buy a particular number of chicken thighs, the number the recipe calls for. The Albanese government is standing firm in the face of American pressure, sort of, saying that we'll spend more money on our armed forces because we want to, not because you want us to, so there! Which doesn't really resolve the question of how many chicken thighs we need. It's certainly true that we're facing unprecedented challenges. In his recent Quarterly Essay "Hard new world", independent defence analyst Hugh White points out that in the Trump era the American alliance is no longer worth the paper it was never printed on (the ANZUS treaty commits the parties only to "consult[ing] together whenever in the opinion of any of them the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the parties is threatened" and to "act[ing] to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes". White concludes that Australia must stand up for itself, cancel AUKUS, and carve out its own foreign policy. Despite his differences with the government, however, he still suggests that "Australia will need to spend a lot more on defence if it wishes to manage the risk of aggression by a great power like China in the decades ahead." Various commentators have pointed out that we already spend rather a lot on our armed forces, coming in at about 11th on world rankings of dollar expenditure - more than Israel, more than Taiwan. For their payments, Taiwan gets a parade ground salute from 1,837,800 uniforms and Israel gets 642,000 (including large reserve forces in both cases). We check in at 79,990, reserves included - notably fewer. Even those critics who don't think we need to spend more on our defence don't suggest we need to spend less, but it would surely be odd if we had purely by chance ended up exactly in the Goldilocks zone. There are hints that we could do rather better. Analysis prepared for the Greens by the parliamentary library and reported by the ABC revealed that "the ranks of senior officers in the Australian military [have] almost doubled over the past 20 years, despite a steady decline in overall numbers of enlisted defence personnel". Critics - and some official reports - suggest "the Defence organisation is top- heavy, over-managed and under-led" (Michael Shoebridge, Strategic Analysis Australia) and "there are ... dangerous weaknesses in our defence capabilities" (Henry Ergas, in The Australian). Armed forces, though, are inherently difficult to manage efficiently. How do you measure the performance of an organisation that you hope is never going to be called upon to do what you would want it to be able to do? How, strategically, do you identify the threats that our forces are designed to combat, given that mentioning the names of these nations in public would move us appreciably closer to such conflicts? How, as a politician, do you cut back on the privileges of the generals without having them leak hostile reports to the media? Faced with these difficult problems, Australian ministers for defence tend to move on to another more compliant portfolio as soon as they can. Australian governments have historically retreated to arguing only about total spending, believing that the public can't cope with more than one number at a time. The other problem, of course, is productivity. Money spent on arms is, in economic terms, a dead end (although it could be said that our acquisition of warships supports our shipbuilding industry, or would, if we had one). There's not much spillover. Money invested almost anywhere else - education, research, infrastructure - would have a payoff down the track; adding more soldiers just withdraws resources from everywhere else and diminishes growth. READ MORE: The longer we can last before we arm up, the more resources we'll have when we need to. If Australia did believe that we were in actual danger of invasion, we would be spending on defence about what we spent in 1943, or 33 per cent of GDP, and we'd also be instituting conscription and rationing. The difference between 2 per cent and 33 per cent is a measure of how safe we feel when not specifically prompted to panic. The trick, of course, is picking the moment to panic. And one of the major tasks facing any Australian government is to make it absolutely clear when the answer is "not remotely yet". Our leaders are very, very bad at it. Then we need to talk about AI and its role in place of foot soldiers. That's a whole other debate. The United States wants Australia to spend more on its armed forces. That's the way nations talk about these things. In everyday life, things are different. I don't make up my shopping list by noting down "spend more on chicken thighs": I want to buy a particular number of chicken thighs, the number the recipe calls for. The Albanese government is standing firm in the face of American pressure, sort of, saying that we'll spend more money on our armed forces because we want to, not because you want us to, so there! Which doesn't really resolve the question of how many chicken thighs we need. It's certainly true that we're facing unprecedented challenges. In his recent Quarterly Essay "Hard new world", independent defence analyst Hugh White points out that in the Trump era the American alliance is no longer worth the paper it was never printed on (the ANZUS treaty commits the parties only to "consult[ing] together whenever in the opinion of any of them the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the parties is threatened" and to "act[ing] to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes". White concludes that Australia must stand up for itself, cancel AUKUS, and carve out its own foreign policy. Despite his differences with the government, however, he still suggests that "Australia will need to spend a lot more on defence if it wishes to manage the risk of aggression by a great power like China in the decades ahead." Various commentators have pointed out that we already spend rather a lot on our armed forces, coming in at about 11th on world rankings of dollar expenditure - more than Israel, more than Taiwan. For their payments, Taiwan gets a parade ground salute from 1,837,800 uniforms and Israel gets 642,000 (including large reserve forces in both cases). We check in at 79,990, reserves included - notably fewer. Even those critics who don't think we need to spend more on our defence don't suggest we need to spend less, but it would surely be odd if we had purely by chance ended up exactly in the Goldilocks zone. There are hints that we could do rather better. Analysis prepared for the Greens by the parliamentary library and reported by the ABC revealed that "the ranks of senior officers in the Australian military [have] almost doubled over the past 20 years, despite a steady decline in overall numbers of enlisted defence personnel". Critics - and some official reports - suggest "the Defence organisation is top- heavy, over-managed and under-led" (Michael Shoebridge, Strategic Analysis Australia) and "there are ... dangerous weaknesses in our defence capabilities" (Henry Ergas, in The Australian). Armed forces, though, are inherently difficult to manage efficiently. How do you measure the performance of an organisation that you hope is never going to be called upon to do what you would want it to be able to do? How, strategically, do you identify the threats that our forces are designed to combat, given that mentioning the names of these nations in public would move us appreciably closer to such conflicts? How, as a politician, do you cut back on the privileges of the generals without having them leak hostile reports to the media? Faced with these difficult problems, Australian ministers for defence tend to move on to another more compliant portfolio as soon as they can. Australian governments have historically retreated to arguing only about total spending, believing that the public can't cope with more than one number at a time. The other problem, of course, is productivity. Money spent on arms is, in economic terms, a dead end (although it could be said that our acquisition of warships supports our shipbuilding industry, or would, if we had one). There's not much spillover. Money invested almost anywhere else - education, research, infrastructure - would have a payoff down the track; adding more soldiers just withdraws resources from everywhere else and diminishes growth. READ MORE: The longer we can last before we arm up, the more resources we'll have when we need to. If Australia did believe that we were in actual danger of invasion, we would be spending on defence about what we spent in 1943, or 33 per cent of GDP, and we'd also be instituting conscription and rationing. The difference between 2 per cent and 33 per cent is a measure of how safe we feel when not specifically prompted to panic. The trick, of course, is picking the moment to panic. And one of the major tasks facing any Australian government is to make it absolutely clear when the answer is "not remotely yet". Our leaders are very, very bad at it. Then we need to talk about AI and its role in place of foot soldiers. That's a whole other debate. The United States wants Australia to spend more on its armed forces. That's the way nations talk about these things. In everyday life, things are different. I don't make up my shopping list by noting down "spend more on chicken thighs": I want to buy a particular number of chicken thighs, the number the recipe calls for. The Albanese government is standing firm in the face of American pressure, sort of, saying that we'll spend more money on our armed forces because we want to, not because you want us to, so there! Which doesn't really resolve the question of how many chicken thighs we need. It's certainly true that we're facing unprecedented challenges. In his recent Quarterly Essay "Hard new world", independent defence analyst Hugh White points out that in the Trump era the American alliance is no longer worth the paper it was never printed on (the ANZUS treaty commits the parties only to "consult[ing] together whenever in the opinion of any of them the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the parties is threatened" and to "act[ing] to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes". White concludes that Australia must stand up for itself, cancel AUKUS, and carve out its own foreign policy. Despite his differences with the government, however, he still suggests that "Australia will need to spend a lot more on defence if it wishes to manage the risk of aggression by a great power like China in the decades ahead." Various commentators have pointed out that we already spend rather a lot on our armed forces, coming in at about 11th on world rankings of dollar expenditure - more than Israel, more than Taiwan. For their payments, Taiwan gets a parade ground salute from 1,837,800 uniforms and Israel gets 642,000 (including large reserve forces in both cases). We check in at 79,990, reserves included - notably fewer. Even those critics who don't think we need to spend more on our defence don't suggest we need to spend less, but it would surely be odd if we had purely by chance ended up exactly in the Goldilocks zone. There are hints that we could do rather better. Analysis prepared for the Greens by the parliamentary library and reported by the ABC revealed that "the ranks of senior officers in the Australian military [have] almost doubled over the past 20 years, despite a steady decline in overall numbers of enlisted defence personnel". Critics - and some official reports - suggest "the Defence organisation is top- heavy, over-managed and under-led" (Michael Shoebridge, Strategic Analysis Australia) and "there are ... dangerous weaknesses in our defence capabilities" (Henry Ergas, in The Australian). Armed forces, though, are inherently difficult to manage efficiently. How do you measure the performance of an organisation that you hope is never going to be called upon to do what you would want it to be able to do? How, strategically, do you identify the threats that our forces are designed to combat, given that mentioning the names of these nations in public would move us appreciably closer to such conflicts? How, as a politician, do you cut back on the privileges of the generals without having them leak hostile reports to the media? Faced with these difficult problems, Australian ministers for defence tend to move on to another more compliant portfolio as soon as they can. Australian governments have historically retreated to arguing only about total spending, believing that the public can't cope with more than one number at a time. The other problem, of course, is productivity. Money spent on arms is, in economic terms, a dead end (although it could be said that our acquisition of warships supports our shipbuilding industry, or would, if we had one). There's not much spillover. Money invested almost anywhere else - education, research, infrastructure - would have a payoff down the track; adding more soldiers just withdraws resources from everywhere else and diminishes growth. READ MORE: The longer we can last before we arm up, the more resources we'll have when we need to. If Australia did believe that we were in actual danger of invasion, we would be spending on defence about what we spent in 1943, or 33 per cent of GDP, and we'd also be instituting conscription and rationing. The difference between 2 per cent and 33 per cent is a measure of how safe we feel when not specifically prompted to panic. The trick, of course, is picking the moment to panic. And one of the major tasks facing any Australian government is to make it absolutely clear when the answer is "not remotely yet". Our leaders are very, very bad at it. Then we need to talk about AI and its role in place of foot soldiers. That's a whole other debate.
The Advertiser
2 hours ago
- The Advertiser
Australia pushing for total tariff relief in US talks
Australia will leave no stone unturned in its push for a full tariff exemption as the foreign affairs minister heads to the US capital for crucial talks. Penny Wong will fly out to Washington on Monday ahead of a meeting of Quad foreign ministers, which includes US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, along with ministers from India and Japan. Her visit, which will also include a one-on-one talk with Mr Rubio, represents a prime opportunity for Australia as all of America's trading partners make their cases for exemptions from President Donald Trump's tariffs regime. The UK was able to strike a deal to ensure steel and aluminium exported to the US are subject to 25 per cent levies, rather than the 50 per cent tariff rate applied to the same goods from other US trading partners. But Australia is aiming higher and will put forward its case for a total tariff exemption. "It shouldn't be 10 (per cent), it should be zero," Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters in Canberra on Monday. "We engage with everyone in the United States. "We've put forward, very clearly, our arguments and will continue to do so." During Mr Trump's first term, Australia - alongside other nations - managed to secure a full exemption on metals tariffs, but the Republican has been far less liberal with his exemptions this time around. The meeting with senior US officials comes after Mr Albanese was due to meet Mr Trump at the G7 summit in Canada earlier in June. However, the talks were cancelled at the eleventh hour due to the situation in the Middle East. Australia has been trying to get the US economic sanctions removed, both the 10 per cent tariff applied to all exports and the 50 per cent tariff for steel and aluminium. But the prime minister could soon get another chance to make his case with the US president, as cabinet minister Tanya Plibersek said the government was awaiting confirmation of a "suitable time" for their meeting. The Quad summit coincides with calls from the US for Australia to lift its defence spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP. Australia is currently on track to grow its defence budget to 2.3 per cent by 2033/34, with the federal government holding firm on its spending commitments. The debate on defence spending comes as a report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute released on Monday called for security for sovereign research to be increased. The report urged for research security to be given the same level for defence priorities as dealing with foreign interference and espionage. "Foreign states have actively targeted Australia's research ecosystem, seeking to influence research agendas, extract sensitive information and exploit institutional vulnerabilities," the report said. "However, the threat landscape hasn't remained static, it has evolved, and rapidly." The report said research security would become even more important as the AUKUS partnership between Australia, the US and the UK developed. Meanwhile, as Mr Albanese prepares to travel to China, its ambassador Xiao Qian has penned an opinion piece arguing that "dramatically increasing military spending places a heavy fiscal burden on the countries involved". "Some countries are ailing yet demand their allies and partners foot the bill for medicine, which seems to be an almost laughable notion," he said, in what appeared to be a reference to the US, in the article published in The Australian on Monday. "China unwaveringly adheres to a defensive national defence policy, with military spending accounting for just 1.5 per cent of its GDP," he said. "It is far below the global average and paling in comparison to certain hegemons or their allies and partners." Australia will leave no stone unturned in its push for a full tariff exemption as the foreign affairs minister heads to the US capital for crucial talks. Penny Wong will fly out to Washington on Monday ahead of a meeting of Quad foreign ministers, which includes US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, along with ministers from India and Japan. Her visit, which will also include a one-on-one talk with Mr Rubio, represents a prime opportunity for Australia as all of America's trading partners make their cases for exemptions from President Donald Trump's tariffs regime. The UK was able to strike a deal to ensure steel and aluminium exported to the US are subject to 25 per cent levies, rather than the 50 per cent tariff rate applied to the same goods from other US trading partners. But Australia is aiming higher and will put forward its case for a total tariff exemption. "It shouldn't be 10 (per cent), it should be zero," Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters in Canberra on Monday. "We engage with everyone in the United States. "We've put forward, very clearly, our arguments and will continue to do so." During Mr Trump's first term, Australia - alongside other nations - managed to secure a full exemption on metals tariffs, but the Republican has been far less liberal with his exemptions this time around. The meeting with senior US officials comes after Mr Albanese was due to meet Mr Trump at the G7 summit in Canada earlier in June. However, the talks were cancelled at the eleventh hour due to the situation in the Middle East. Australia has been trying to get the US economic sanctions removed, both the 10 per cent tariff applied to all exports and the 50 per cent tariff for steel and aluminium. But the prime minister could soon get another chance to make his case with the US president, as cabinet minister Tanya Plibersek said the government was awaiting confirmation of a "suitable time" for their meeting. The Quad summit coincides with calls from the US for Australia to lift its defence spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP. Australia is currently on track to grow its defence budget to 2.3 per cent by 2033/34, with the federal government holding firm on its spending commitments. The debate on defence spending comes as a report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute released on Monday called for security for sovereign research to be increased. The report urged for research security to be given the same level for defence priorities as dealing with foreign interference and espionage. "Foreign states have actively targeted Australia's research ecosystem, seeking to influence research agendas, extract sensitive information and exploit institutional vulnerabilities," the report said. "However, the threat landscape hasn't remained static, it has evolved, and rapidly." The report said research security would become even more important as the AUKUS partnership between Australia, the US and the UK developed. Meanwhile, as Mr Albanese prepares to travel to China, its ambassador Xiao Qian has penned an opinion piece arguing that "dramatically increasing military spending places a heavy fiscal burden on the countries involved". "Some countries are ailing yet demand their allies and partners foot the bill for medicine, which seems to be an almost laughable notion," he said, in what appeared to be a reference to the US, in the article published in The Australian on Monday. "China unwaveringly adheres to a defensive national defence policy, with military spending accounting for just 1.5 per cent of its GDP," he said. "It is far below the global average and paling in comparison to certain hegemons or their allies and partners." Australia will leave no stone unturned in its push for a full tariff exemption as the foreign affairs minister heads to the US capital for crucial talks. Penny Wong will fly out to Washington on Monday ahead of a meeting of Quad foreign ministers, which includes US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, along with ministers from India and Japan. Her visit, which will also include a one-on-one talk with Mr Rubio, represents a prime opportunity for Australia as all of America's trading partners make their cases for exemptions from President Donald Trump's tariffs regime. The UK was able to strike a deal to ensure steel and aluminium exported to the US are subject to 25 per cent levies, rather than the 50 per cent tariff rate applied to the same goods from other US trading partners. But Australia is aiming higher and will put forward its case for a total tariff exemption. "It shouldn't be 10 (per cent), it should be zero," Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters in Canberra on Monday. "We engage with everyone in the United States. "We've put forward, very clearly, our arguments and will continue to do so." During Mr Trump's first term, Australia - alongside other nations - managed to secure a full exemption on metals tariffs, but the Republican has been far less liberal with his exemptions this time around. The meeting with senior US officials comes after Mr Albanese was due to meet Mr Trump at the G7 summit in Canada earlier in June. However, the talks were cancelled at the eleventh hour due to the situation in the Middle East. Australia has been trying to get the US economic sanctions removed, both the 10 per cent tariff applied to all exports and the 50 per cent tariff for steel and aluminium. But the prime minister could soon get another chance to make his case with the US president, as cabinet minister Tanya Plibersek said the government was awaiting confirmation of a "suitable time" for their meeting. The Quad summit coincides with calls from the US for Australia to lift its defence spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP. Australia is currently on track to grow its defence budget to 2.3 per cent by 2033/34, with the federal government holding firm on its spending commitments. The debate on defence spending comes as a report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute released on Monday called for security for sovereign research to be increased. The report urged for research security to be given the same level for defence priorities as dealing with foreign interference and espionage. "Foreign states have actively targeted Australia's research ecosystem, seeking to influence research agendas, extract sensitive information and exploit institutional vulnerabilities," the report said. "However, the threat landscape hasn't remained static, it has evolved, and rapidly." The report said research security would become even more important as the AUKUS partnership between Australia, the US and the UK developed. Meanwhile, as Mr Albanese prepares to travel to China, its ambassador Xiao Qian has penned an opinion piece arguing that "dramatically increasing military spending places a heavy fiscal burden on the countries involved". "Some countries are ailing yet demand their allies and partners foot the bill for medicine, which seems to be an almost laughable notion," he said, in what appeared to be a reference to the US, in the article published in The Australian on Monday. "China unwaveringly adheres to a defensive national defence policy, with military spending accounting for just 1.5 per cent of its GDP," he said. "It is far below the global average and paling in comparison to certain hegemons or their allies and partners." Australia will leave no stone unturned in its push for a full tariff exemption as the foreign affairs minister heads to the US capital for crucial talks. Penny Wong will fly out to Washington on Monday ahead of a meeting of Quad foreign ministers, which includes US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, along with ministers from India and Japan. Her visit, which will also include a one-on-one talk with Mr Rubio, represents a prime opportunity for Australia as all of America's trading partners make their cases for exemptions from President Donald Trump's tariffs regime. The UK was able to strike a deal to ensure steel and aluminium exported to the US are subject to 25 per cent levies, rather than the 50 per cent tariff rate applied to the same goods from other US trading partners. But Australia is aiming higher and will put forward its case for a total tariff exemption. "It shouldn't be 10 (per cent), it should be zero," Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters in Canberra on Monday. "We engage with everyone in the United States. "We've put forward, very clearly, our arguments and will continue to do so." During Mr Trump's first term, Australia - alongside other nations - managed to secure a full exemption on metals tariffs, but the Republican has been far less liberal with his exemptions this time around. The meeting with senior US officials comes after Mr Albanese was due to meet Mr Trump at the G7 summit in Canada earlier in June. However, the talks were cancelled at the eleventh hour due to the situation in the Middle East. Australia has been trying to get the US economic sanctions removed, both the 10 per cent tariff applied to all exports and the 50 per cent tariff for steel and aluminium. But the prime minister could soon get another chance to make his case with the US president, as cabinet minister Tanya Plibersek said the government was awaiting confirmation of a "suitable time" for their meeting. The Quad summit coincides with calls from the US for Australia to lift its defence spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP. Australia is currently on track to grow its defence budget to 2.3 per cent by 2033/34, with the federal government holding firm on its spending commitments. The debate on defence spending comes as a report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute released on Monday called for security for sovereign research to be increased. The report urged for research security to be given the same level for defence priorities as dealing with foreign interference and espionage. "Foreign states have actively targeted Australia's research ecosystem, seeking to influence research agendas, extract sensitive information and exploit institutional vulnerabilities," the report said. "However, the threat landscape hasn't remained static, it has evolved, and rapidly." The report said research security would become even more important as the AUKUS partnership between Australia, the US and the UK developed. Meanwhile, as Mr Albanese prepares to travel to China, its ambassador Xiao Qian has penned an opinion piece arguing that "dramatically increasing military spending places a heavy fiscal burden on the countries involved". "Some countries are ailing yet demand their allies and partners foot the bill for medicine, which seems to be an almost laughable notion," he said, in what appeared to be a reference to the US, in the article published in The Australian on Monday. "China unwaveringly adheres to a defensive national defence policy, with military spending accounting for just 1.5 per cent of its GDP," he said. "It is far below the global average and paling in comparison to certain hegemons or their allies and partners."
