Over on ABC radio RN Breakfast, trade minister Don Farrell is asked about Donald Trump’s top trade advisor Peter Navarro‘s claim that Australia broke a verbal agreement to limit aluminum shipments to the US after it was made exempt from the first round of Trump tariffs, made during the Turnbull/Morrison years.

The notes app version is in 2018, Australia received an exemption from tariffs under the Trump administration. But from 2019/2020, there was an increase (what the US now says is a ‘surge’) in Australian aluminum imports, which was largely under the Biden administration. Biden officials were not upset, but Trump officials, now back in office, are (the implication being that Australia should have stuck to whatever deal the Trump administration throught it had forever, even when Trump wasn’t in office).

It takes Farrell awhile to get there, but after some good, focused questioning from Sally Sara, he says:

I understand that there’s a ceiling to how much we we export to the United States. Of course, in the middle of all of this, you had the Russia, Ukraine war. And I understand that because of difficulties in arrangements between getting Russian aluminum into the United States, we increased the amount of aluminum that we supplied into the into the American market, but all of that was done with the full knowledge of the American government. We haven’t done at any stage, anything that the American government has not been comfortable with.

So the answer is – Russia’s invasion of Ukraine set off supply chain issues and Australia increased its shipments of aluminum to the States to fill the gap, and that was done with the full knowledge of the then-US administration.