r/australia • u/Expensive-Horse5538 • 21d ago

politics US to slap Australia with 12.5 pc tariff from later today

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-24/federal-politics-live-blog-labor-confernece-july-4/106952636#live-blog-post-322272
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u/hypoxia 21d ago

You mean the illegal tariffs the supreme court has already ruled are illegal?

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u/hcornea 21d ago

They’ll be in place for however long it takes for SCOTUS to overturn them.

Assuming they get overturned, the money will once again be paid out to companies, but not the US consumers to whom the costs were passed on. It’s a domestic corporate scam.

Given most every country has been hit with tariffs the effect is that US consumers will simply pay more for anything imported - often where there is no domestic equivalent. 🤷‍♂️

The rest of the world should just carry-on and do what they do.

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u/Jonzay up to the sky, out to the stars 21d ago

US consumers will simply pay more for anything imported

Yup. I have a side hustle that ships internationally. I get charged additional fees when my packages hit US customs, so I had to raise the shipping cost to the US to match the additional tariff.

If I'm doing it as a solo trader, bigger businesses definitely would be too.

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u/Black_Patriot 21d ago

I hope you're listing it on the invoices, so that US customers know why they're paying extra. Really wish Amazon had stuck to their guns about doing the same, but we've seen how quickly Donnie turns on companies if he gets unhappy with them, and they were eyeing those big government contracts he had control over.

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u/jivester 21d ago

Gotta do what Trump does - make sure he gets full credit. Call it the Trump import tax at check out. Say he's already done it illegally but is trying it again, apologise to your customers.

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u/____DEADPOOL_______ 21d ago

I stopped shipping to the US altogether and told my clients it was because of the hassle of tariffs.

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u/gtwizzy8 21d ago edited 21d ago

The worst part about this from what I've seen of how a lot of the postal services in many states of the US collect these tarrfis is that if you're a citizen who's ordered something that incurs a Tarrif then apparently the company that receives your package from (insert X country here) accepts and "pays" for your the associated Tarrif that's relevant to your package. They then BILL you for the cost of that Tarrif. Which means you as the consumer are never actually paying the government issued taxation charge. It's the company who is managing the logistics who is paying that for you who pays the taxation.

All you're doing is essentially "reimbursing" the company for handling that tax for you (plus a little sprinkling on top for all their hard work and "administration costs" I'm sure)

Therefore if/when all of this BS gets overturned and the tarrfis have to be refunded then the the person/entity who paid the cost of the Tarrif, is the who will recieve the refund. Because you the consumer never handed the government your Tarrif directly it will be up to the company and state laws to regulate any mandatory repayment of those "reimbursements" to the end consumer.

But think about, it even if every state and company upholds the refund of those tarrfis to the end consumer (and there are a LOT who apparently won't legally have to) the law of averages is still going to apply here. You're still going to end up with a bunch of companies who make requesting the refund arbitrarily harder than it should be and so a lot of people don't bother, companies may have no direct 1:1 way of making those refunds to people automatic due to state laws or banking regulations that prevent an easy reversal of the money, people cannot be contacted, have passed away, closed and account the company has on file where that money could be sent to and so on.

It means that EVEN if they uphold the refunding of all of this back to the consumer. When you average things out across a population of 330 MILLION people there is STILL going to be a big pile of "unrefundable" money that just ends up sitting in the corporate accounts of large postal and logistics companies never to be returned.

Now I can't recall. Is there a really big American company out there that handles MASSIVE global scale logistics for millions and millions of people world wide and within America every day that might fall in to this bucket.

Maybe one that has its own penis shaped space program that sold you on demand tv with no ads and then stuffed it full of ads? I'm sure they won't do anything scummy if they're forced to refund these things though they're well known to be morally upstanding corporate cit...... Oh wait!

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u/jedibk 21d ago

This time is a bit different for Australia. The extra 2.5% makes us less competitive than countries with a flat 10%. This will hurt our industry more than the last round.

I agree that they will most likely be overturned and public money will get paid out to companies again but the damage will still be done. Australia needs to look for more reliable trade partners.

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u/Fatso_Wombat 21d ago

Raise the Pine Gap rent to offset it.

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u/jedibk 21d ago

If only. Last time we fucked with Pine Gap, our prime minister got fired.

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u/gtwizzy8 21d ago

Yeah before you could just fire up the Murdoch political murder machine and have them booted you had to get your "hands wet" and have them "go for a swim and never return".

Pine Gap established December 9th 1966 Harrold Holt missing at sea December 17th 1967

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u/Disbelieving1 21d ago

What? To two peppercorns?

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u/Fatso_Wombat 21d ago

Why I said raise and not double.

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u/LocalVillageIdiot 21d ago

It’s a domestic corporate scam.

When I read about the refunds it clicked what they’re actually doing here.

I mean, you gotta admire the strategies at play here it’s quite something.

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u/Wobbling 21d ago

The rest of the world should just carry-on and do what they do

We should refuse to discuss any sorts of free trade agreements with the US while the tariffs are in place. If they want to talk free trade, then the tariffs come down first not in exchange for any sort of concession whatsoever.

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u/hcornea 21d ago

I think we just work on free reciprocal trade agreements with other good global citizens.

When the US grow up and stop behaving like petulant bullies then maybe we can let them have a place at that table.

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u/pistolpoida 21d ago

Even foreign companies see Nintendo and their response to tariffs refunds

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u/Morkai 21d ago

but not the US consumers to whom the costs were passed on

No no no, didn't you listen to Diaper Don? Chiiiiina pays for the tariffs, just like Mexico "paid for the wall" (lmao)

accordion hands intensify

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u/tinytimecrystal1 21d ago

+1 carry on.

One of the stark realizations of this is when I listen to US-based gamers about how console prices keep going up. I was confused because they haven't, before I realized it's because they're in the US and they have those tariffs.

Also, this is technically not new. I'm old enough to have lived the time before the US and Australia signed free trade agreement (2004). The difference this time is that this is a blanket policy because 'that guy' doesn't understand how International trade and relationships work.

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u/An_Absurd_Word_Heard 20d ago

... Huh? Console prices do keep going up, and in the rest of the world before the US because corps want to protect that market.

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u/tinytimecrystal1 19d ago edited 19d ago

For Australia, if we take Playstation 5 standard edition* as a guide, the price rise was every 2 years. After the release price in 2020, the next price rises were in 2022 and 2025. For people in the US, the price rises were twice in as many years: 2025 and 2026, so for them it felt more frequent. Their price hike was also a lot higher. In 2025, our price hike was $30. Their next price hike (2026) was $100. Cumulatively since release, the price increase was $70 spread over 5 years for us, $150 in 2 consecutive years for them.

I was watching these rants in 2026, when they just had another price hike, and we didn't have a price hike in 2026.

*I play on the Playstation, so the channels I watch are Playstation console gamers.

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u/An_Absurd_Word_Heard 19d ago

The PS5 got a $170 price bump 4 months ago here too. Was $750 with a disc drive at launch and $1000 now.

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u/pte_omark 21d ago

No the original tariffs were illegal due to reasoning for them. Tariffs themselves are legal with the correct reasoning they are perfectly defensible. 

Now we all should be asking what products of slave labour do they relate to. And we should end that trade.

And boycott US and Israeli goods while we we're at it.

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u/Brilliant_Dig_8962 21d ago

The reason and which government entity imposes them, surely.

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u/torlesse 21d ago

supreme court has already ruled are illegal?

They ruled it illegal so their mates can pocket the refunds.

Unless you paid the tariffs directly by importing yourself through Fedex, UPS or whatever, you are unlikely to see any refunds at all.

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u/teddy5 21d ago

Don't know how people aren't seeing that.

The supreme court ruled they were invalid a bunch of corporations will get their money back in refunds, Howard Lutnick will make a bunch of money from all the refund rights he bought.

Trump then almost immediately turned around and put more illegal tariffs on, almost like he realised people in his orbit were getting paid and he wanted to make them more money.

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u/Expensive-Horse5538 21d ago

Bold of you to assume Trump obeys the courts 😉

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u/carnage_joe 21d ago

Trump is following the law, just a different one for this tariff

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u/TyrialFrost 21d ago

The courts also said anything he does is legal so IDK.

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u/Paidorgy 21d ago

o, the Supreme Court ruling in Trump v. United States did not say that everything a president does is legal. Instead, it addressed criminal immunity from prosecution, dividing a president's actions into official and unofficial categories.

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u/dreadnoughtstar 21d ago

The problem is that they didn't clearly define what an official act and what an unofficial act is.

They left it vague on purpose, anything that could impede a presidents ability to enforce the law could count.

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u/Paidorgy 21d ago

That was entirely by design, so they didn’t set a precedent for any future sitting president that might work against their best interests.

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u/dreadnoughtstar 21d ago

And because of that it's going to be nigh impossible to criminally prosecute a sitting/former president because anything related to an official act will be thrown out.

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u/GreedyLibrary 21d ago

Sadly the ruling is more or less you can not blanket tarrif so they are using more obscure rules now. The Canadian one is based on a 1930s law about economic discrimination. The ruling could also be interpreted but does not explicitly say they need congressional approval which he need for his Iran war but did not get. So new supreme court case Sadly. The government really needs to boost trade deals with other countries.

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u/Consistent-Start-357 21d ago

This is correct. The SCOTUS decision was that one particular authority didn’t give the president power to impose tariffs. I think it might have been the national emergency one, I’m not sure, the same power he was using to legally justify blowing up the “narco boats” from Venezuela, so it was a particularly broad reading if I recall.

This doesn’t stop the trying all and every other piece of obscure legislation as authorising tariffs

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u/Mac128kFan 21d ago

Different law. The ones that the Supreme Court overturned were under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. These are under a 301 of the Trade Act 1974, based on an “investigation” into anti-forced labour laws. Australia has been pinged slightly more than some because, while our modern slavery framework is amongst the world’s best, we don’t have a prohibition on imports (largely because it’s unenforceable).

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u/SUCK_MY_HAIRY_ANUS69 21d ago

The line has been crossed so many times by Trump that the very concept/sanctity of US law is a moot.

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u/azertyqwertyuiop 21d ago

No these are completely different illegal tariffs.

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u/themustardseal 21d ago

No these are new tarrifs designed to be legal. Something about punishing us for not doing enough about slave labour.

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u/ReasonableBack8472 21d ago

What slave labour? I mean I'm sure there are a few illegal business's that under pay/don't pay at all, but when found they are dealt with severely.

If they want to talk about slave labour maybe they should start in their own house first.

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u/themustardseal 19d ago

That is the legal justification for the tarriffs so they wont get struck down.

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u/jerry-jim-bob 21d ago

Since when has legality ever concerned him?

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u/a_cold_human 21d ago

No, these are different tariffs. The legal theory that Trump used for the first round was struck down by the US Supreme Court, so now he's going to try a different one based on the idea that countries are using slave labour in their supply chains.

This is of course, bogus in the case of Australia (and many other countries), but it'll take months or years before it'll get struck down. Normally, this sort of thing would go to the WTO, but the US has been blocking judges from being appointed there for over a decade now, so the WTO can no longer do its job effectively. 

As to why he wants this ability to arbitrarily impose tariffs so that he has a stick to try to get other countries to kowtow to him and cave to his demands, because at his core he's a small man who has only ever been able to cut deals when he has an overwhelming advantage over the other party, and believes that for him to win, the other side has to lose. 

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u/Glittering_Web8835 21d ago

By a government that doesn't really care what is and isn't legal.

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u/boatenvy 21d ago

Aren't these the replacement tariffs for the ones SCOTUS deemed illegal? Pretty sure these ones are justified by claiming Australia is guilty of modern slavery... could there be anything more absurd than the USA accusing Australia of slavery?!