Canberra hasn’t been idle, which is a good thing. A free trade deal was reached with the EU in March. The UAE deal is in force. A protocol with Singapore covers essential supplies. Critical minerals cooperation with Washington has grown into multi-billion-dollar project lists. The government’s Trade 2040 (Opens in new window) horizon talks the language of diversification. Limited anti-dumping actions have been taken. All of this is useful. None of it yet matches the speed or the scope of the shift elsewhere.
The risk for countries that still preach openness isn’t a sudden conversion to autarky. It is slowness – and lingering hope that a restored multilateral rulebook is just one more ministerial away. While others subsidise processing, ring-fence procurement, and treat investment as a security tool, Australia can find itself exporting unprocessed rock into a market that no longer wants to be dependent on it, and importing the finished green-tech and AI stack from the two capitals it most needs to hedge against.
Realism doesn’t mean joining the subsidy race to the bottom or wrapping the economy in tariffs. Australia is too small, too specialised, and too trade-exposed for that. It means treating partnerships as infrastructure, not communiqués, and building them now rather than after a WTO revival that isn’t coming.
It means preferring trade partners who can absorb more than bulk commodities – India, Southeast Asia, Japan, Korea, the EU, and the Gulf – and writing agreements that cover services, data and procurement, not just tariffs. Plurilateral deals among the willing will do more work than consensus among 166 members.
On investment, it means being equally serious about attracting patient capital from those same partners and screening capital that arrives with political strings. On the green transition, it means using Australia’s energy and mineral endowment to lock in processing and green-metals partnerships so the country isn’t merely the quarry for other countries’ net-zero plans. On AI, it means energy, compute, skills, and standards coalitions that reduce default dependence on America’s AI hardware and models, and increasingly also on Chinese open-weight models.
Australia can stay open without staying sentimental. The middle-power interest is coalitions of the commercially compatible: countries that still want rules, still need resources and technology, and are large enough together to matter. Waiting endlessly for WTO reform isn’t prudence. It is a strategy for arriving late.
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