SYDNEY: Australia expressed puzzlement on Thursday (Apr 3) over Donald Trump’s decision to slap a 29 per cent 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 over 2,000 people and lies 1,600km northeast of Sydney.
Its main industry is tourism.
The island’s chamber of commerce says it ranked as the world’s number 223 exporter in 2019, shipping goods worth A$2.7 million (US$1.7 million) 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 per cent.
“I’m not sure what Norfolk Island’s major exports are to the US and why it’s been singled out, but it has,” 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 US,” he added.
It “exemplifies the fact that nowhere on Earth is exempt from this”.
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”.
Even harder to explain, perhaps, Trump imposed a 10 per cent 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 website explains.
