Australia yesterday expressed puzzlement over US President Donald Trump’s decision to slap a 29 percent trade tariff on its tiny Pacific territory of Norfolk Island.
The island — home to many descendants of the HMS Bounty mutineers — has a total population of a little more than 2,000 people and lies 1,600km northeast of Sydney.
Its main industry is tourism.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The island’s chamber of commerce says it ranked as the world’s No. 223 exporter in 2019, shipping A$2.7 million (US$1.7 million) of goods led by soybean meal and sowing seeds.
Yet a global tariff list brandished by Trump showed it was being punished with a tariff nearly three times higher than the Australian mainland’s 10 percent.
“I’m not sure what Norfolk Island’s major exports are to the United States and why it’s been singled out, but it has,” Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters. “I’m not quite sure that Norfolk Island, with respect to it, is a trade competitor with the giant economy of the United States.”
It “exemplifies the fact that nowhere on Earth is exempt from this,” Albanese said.
In any case, the prime minister could not say why the island would not face the same US tariff as the rest of the country.
“Last time I looked, Norfolk Island was a part of Australia,” he later told public radio ABC, describing it as “somewhat unexpected and a bit strange.”
Trump also imposed a 10 percent tariff on imports from Australia’s Heard and McDonald Islands territory in the sub-antarctic — which are uninhabited by humans, but provide a home to large numbers of penguins.
“Due to the extreme isolation of Heard Island and McDonald Islands, together with the persistently severe weather and sea conditions, human activities in the region have been, and remain, limited,” an Australian government Web site says.
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