Trump slaps 15% trade tariff on NZ goods
New Zealand exports to the US will face a 15% tariff rate, it has been announced.
The White House has revised its list of tariffs for particular countries and New Zealand has been put on a 15% base rate, up from the original 10% announced earlier.
US President Donald Trump announced the tariffs in April and said they would be imposed on more than 125 countries.
Tariffs are paid by importers of products from other countries to their own governments, like taxes, effectively making imported goods more expensive for local consumers.
Advocates say they protect local economies, while detractors say they reduce trade and push up prices.
In announcing the initial range of tariffs in April, Trump caused confusion when he held up a chart, saying New Zealand charged US goods a 20% tariff, which the New Zealand Government denied.
It ended up being 10%, which Finance Minister Nicola Willis at the time called "extraordinary".
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said New Zealand would not respond in kind.
Two-thirds of Kiwi businesses in a survey earlier this year thought the tariffs would have a more severe global impact than Covid-19 and the global financial crisis over the next 12 months.
Trump has repeatedly threatened a range of different tariffs on various nations since returning to the White House. Most recently, he targeted India, citing its own trade barriers and purchasing of energy and arms from Russia, and Canada, over its newfound support for Palestinian statehood.
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RNZ News
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NZ Herald
an hour ago
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NZ Herald
an hour ago
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Brazilian officials insisted they will not back down in the face of Trump's threats, saying regulating social media platforms is a consumer safety issue, like driving laws. 'Self-regulation has proven a failure,' Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes said. 'Your freedom does not mean to be free to go the wrong way and crash into another car and kill another driver,' Cármen Lúcia, the president of Brazil's Superior Electoral Court, told the fact-checking conference. Before Trump entered politics, I found that many politicians spun or dissembled but most tried to keep their claims tethered to the truth. Our fact checks covered a range of topics, such as the accuracy of government statistics on students dying from alcohol or exaggerated claims about sex trafficking, which led lawmakers to stop using them. President Barack Obama told the occasional whopper – 'If you like your healthcare plan, you'll be able to keep your healthcare plan' – but it was the rare politician, such as Minnesota Republican Representative Michelle Bachmann, who constantly spouted Pinocchio-laden nonsense. Obama's Vice-President, Joe Biden, also had a reputation for mangling the truth: in 2011, Biden touted an Obama-era jobs bill by claiming the number of rapes in Flint, Michigan, had – depending on the hour of the day – doubled, tripled or even quadrupled because the number of police had been reduced. There was no evidence to support any of his statistics. But Bachmann and Biden were outliers. In the 2012 presidential campaign between Obama and Mitt Romney, the former Republican Governor of Massachusetts, the two candidates were neck-and-neck in their average Pinocchio rating. Indeed, they had the lowest average number of Pinocchios of the major 2012 presidential candidates. They also took fact checks seriously. 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In 2016, Trump's opponents still cared about the facts. Florida Governor Jeb Bush's campaign had a wall where they posted positive fact checks. Ohio Governor John Kasich dropped a talking point simply in response to my question for a possible fact check. Hillary Clinton's staff worked hard to find policy experts to vouch for her statistics. (Her comments on her private email server were less defensible.) But Trump didn't care. He kept rising in the polls and eventually won the presidency. Other politicians took notice and followed his lead. Besides Trump, something else changed the nature of truth in the mid-2010s: the rise of social media. The Fact Checker was launched in 2007, one year after the creation of Twitter and when Facebook had only 50 million users. By 2012, Facebook had 1 billion followers; it reached nearly 1.6 billion in 2015. Trump adroitly used Twitter – where he had 2.76 million followers at the start of 2015 – and other social media to spread his message. Trump's call to ban Muslims from entering the United States was the most-talked-about moment on Facebook among the 2016 candidates in all of 2015, according to Facebook data. Social media helped fuel the rise of Trump – and made it easier for false claims to circulate. Russian operatives in 2016 used fake accounts on social media to spread disinformation and create divisive content – tactics that led companies such as Meta to begin to use fact-checkers to identify misleading content. But the political forces that benefited from false information – such as Trump and his allies – led a backlash against such efforts, saying it was a form of censorship. Now tech companies are scaling back their efforts to combat misinformation. In Trump's second term, even venerable institutions such as the State Department – which I covered for nine years – spout falsehoods to attack efforts to combat disinformation. 'In Europe, thousands are being convicted for the crime of criticising their own governments,' the department said in an X, formerly Twitter post on July 22. 'This Orwellian message won't fool the United States. Censorship is not freedom.' (The post was in response to a French Government post promoting the Digital Services Act.) When I asked the State Department for evidence of the claim that 'thousands' had been convicted, the department twice asked for more time to respond – and then declined to comment. Many on the left and right argue that fact-checking is merely another form of opinion journalism, disguised behind a veneer of objectivity. But research found that the three main American fact-checkers – The Fact Checker, PolitiFact and – reached the same conclusion on similar statements at least 95% of the time. Of course, some might say this only shows we are all biased in the same way. During Trump's first term, The Fact Checker team documented that he made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims. Week after week, I would write fact checks unpacking his latest misstatements, and Trump generally earned Four Pinocchios – the rating for a whopper. But I sense that the country has gotten so used to Trump exaggerating the truth that it no longer seems surprising. I chose not to repeat the exercise in his second term. Even as he racked up Pinocchios, Trump mentioned them almost 20 times during his first administration. He either complained about receiving Pinocchios or cited them when I awarded Pinocchios to one of his political foes, such as then California Representative Adam Schiff. During the 2024 campaign, Trump sometimes mentioned Pinocchios, such as in a campaign stop in Waunakee, Wisconsin, in October. 'I have to be very careful when I talk because the fake news, if I say something wrong, a little wrong, if I'm 3% off ... they'll give me Pinocchios,' he told a rally. 'You know the Pinocchio? The Washington Post, they give you Pinocchios. If you say something perfectly, they give you a Pinocchio.' But since Trump took office for a second time in January, he hasn't mentioned Pinocchios again. In an era where false claims are the norm, it's much easier to ignore the fact-checkers.
