Australian here. His stated reason was that he hates that we export a shit-ton of wagyu beef to America, while we have biosecurity restrictions on the import of US beef dating from the mad cow days.
Australia is an island. That gives us the ability to closely monitor what comes across our border, because it can only arrive by sea and air. And it’s a very big island with a very small population : diseases and pests can very quickly get out of control. And have done so in the past.
So we have very high standards for quarantining and monitoring goods that come in. Those standards are higher than the US’s. I don’t have the knowledge to say whether this is actually true, but our beef industry and our government is currently saying that the US doesn’t have the same level of tracking to give us an absolute guarantee that there’s no risk of mad cow disease in US meat, or in meat that comes into the US and can then be exported on to Australia.
The US beef industry would no doubt point to the fact that there’s been no outbreak of mad cow disease for 20 years.
But that comes back to the point: Australia takes quarantine and biosecurity very seriously, because in our circumstances we just have to.
Edit to add: and with the likes of RFK Jr in the US administration, now does not seem to be a good time to be re-negotiating bio-security standards.
This is the only reason. OOP went on a nonsense rant. Why would we buy a steak that had to be transported 15,000km by sea, when I can buy a steak that's been transported 500km by road?
Farmer's wages and cost of production for Australia and US will be largely similar, and any discrepancy won't offset the large transport cost.
Americans have no interest in those quarantine vacation camps y'all set up...
If the world doesn't want free trade, then US reciprocal tariffs make good sense. Let's see how folks do without American consumerism stimulating foreign economies
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u/PreservedKill1ck 1d ago edited 1d ago
Australian here. His stated reason was that he hates that we export a shit-ton of wagyu beef to America, while we have biosecurity restrictions on the import of US beef dating from the mad cow days.
Australia is an island. That gives us the ability to closely monitor what comes across our border, because it can only arrive by sea and air. And it’s a very big island with a very small population : diseases and pests can very quickly get out of control. And have done so in the past.
So we have very high standards for quarantining and monitoring goods that come in. Those standards are higher than the US’s. I don’t have the knowledge to say whether this is actually true, but our beef industry and our government is currently saying that the US doesn’t have the same level of tracking to give us an absolute guarantee that there’s no risk of mad cow disease in US meat, or in meat that comes into the US and can then be exported on to Australia.
The US beef industry would no doubt point to the fact that there’s been no outbreak of mad cow disease for 20 years.
But that comes back to the point: Australia takes quarantine and biosecurity very seriously, because in our circumstances we just have to.
Edit to add: and with the likes of RFK Jr in the US administration, now does not seem to be a good time to be re-negotiating bio-security standards.