Industry minister is speaking to the ABC where he is doing his best to remind US embassy staff who will be clipping this up and sending it through their diplomatic channels to Trump’s White House that Australia is totally cool friends with the US.

On the possibility of an exemption from the trade tariffs, Husic says:

We would want this as soon as possible. Removing the uncertainty, I think, would be welcomed here. I think the points that have been stressed by the Prime Minister but I might add there have been a number of people within government, across government that, have been making the points. We have a trade surplus with the US. We are long-standing allies. We have a lot of things that we’re working on together. Australian aluminium in particular, while we do make a bit of money exporting it, it makes up a very small part of the total number of imports that are coming in to the US in terms of aluminium. And the aluminium – there is a requirement by the US, they need aluminium. We’re a reliable supplier of it and there are only a few countries in the world that do supply – Russia, China, the Middle East, Canada, Australia – that are producing and exporting aluminium and we think as an ally we’re in a strong position to support that and we would think those arguments would be pretty powerful and taken into account by the Administration.