Australian Official: Ending de Minimis Exemption Is 'Going Down the Wrong Path'
Australian small businesses were given too little time to comply with the U.S. decision to end the de minimis exemption for low-value imports (see 2508280062), said Don Farrell, Australia’s trade minister. Farrell said he raised Australia’s "disappointment" earlier in the week with U.S. Trade Representative General Counsel Jennifer Thornton, adding that the move is mostly hurting “mum and dad operations that have had a successful product going into” the U.S.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
“We've said to the Americans, look, firstly, we don't agree with what you've done, but if you're going to do it, then you've got to do it in a way that people can comply with,” Farrell said during an Aug. 29 press conference, according to a transcript of his remarks. “These operators were given less than a month to make changes to get their product into the United States.” He said he hopes, as a result of his conversations with the USTR, that the two sides “can do something to ensure that our products, our great products, continue to get into the United States.”
Farrell added that Australia has “the lowest tariffs of any country in the world” and called the U.S. tariffs “an action of self‑harm by the American government.”
“We continue to prosecute the argument with the Americans that they're actually going down the wrong path,” he said.
The Australian Post, the country's official mail carrier, reportedly suspended its transit service to the U.S. ahead of the end of the de minimis exemption on Aug. 29 (see 2508210036).