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Washington: The Trump administration is imposing a 100 per cent tariff on imports of patented drugs, with Australian-made pharmaceuticals subject to the highest possible rate despite carve-outs for other countries.

The Albanese government and the opposition expressed concern about the impact on Australian drugmakers and the US government’s shift away from free trade.

However, Australia’s largest biotech firm, CSL, could face a lower tariff rate or be exempt from the new duties, which will not apply to products derived from blood plasma in certain circumstances.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday afternoon (Washington time) enacting a long-signalled intention to impose tariffs on foreign pharmaceuticals in a bid to re-shore production in the US.

The standard rate is 100 per cent, although several countries received a discount as part of broader trade deals. The European Union, Japan, South Korea and Switzerland are all subject to a 15 per cent tariff, and the United Kingdom even lower.

While we are always working with our trading partners and close allies like Australia, Australia does not have a special pharma tariff rate,” a White House official told this masthead.

Trump’s executive order reduces the tariff to 20 per cent for companies that move production to the US, and to zero if that country also gives the US “most favoured nation” status in relation to drug pricing.

ASX-listed biotech giant CSL – which has plants in the US, Australia and Europe – last year announced a $US1.5 billion ($2.17 billion) expansion of its American operations. Workers broke ground last month at the company’s manufacturing facility in Kankakee, Illinois – with the expansion set to be completed by 2031.

A White House official said CSL would need to submit its plan to the US Commerce Department, which has the discretion to grant exemptions.

The text of Trump’s executive order said the tariff will be set to zero for plasma derived therapies if they come from a country with a current or forthcoming trade deal with the US, or they meet an urgent US health need.

Australia has not signed a trade deal with the Trump administration, but the two countries have a long-standing free trade agreement.

During a brief appearance at the White House, Trump’s trade tsar Jamieson Greer said the executive order was focused on deals that had “already been made” with companies making drugs in countries such as Australia, Austria and France. He did not take questions.

A CSL spokesman said the company was pleased the Trump administration had carved out plasma-derived therapies, which constituted the vast majority of its trade into the US.

“We’re reviewing the materials released today and will continue working with the administration to ensure access to plasma therapies,” he said.

A spokesman for Australian Trade Minister Don Farrell said the Albanese government was disappointed by the tariff decision and would strongly argue for their removal.

Appearing on Channel Seven’s Sunrise on Friday morning, Health Minister Mark Butler said the government was “pretty confident” CSL would be exempted, but had serious concerns for other exporters.

He also indicated Australia was not for turning on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, about which the US administration has also raised concerns.

“There’s no way we’re negotiating about those fundamental elements of the PBS that have served Australia so well for 80 years,” Butler said.

Opposition Leader Angus Taylor said the Coalition believed in free trade. “This is obviously not welcome news, we don’t want to see it,” he told Sunrise. “We’ll work with the government to do anything we have to [do] to get it overturned or get an exemption for Australian exporters.”

Senior Trump administration officials, speaking on a briefing call to reporters, said large companies would have 120 days until the new tariffs kick in. Smaller companies will have six months. They said any new facilities must be completed by the end of Trump’s term in January 2029

“In those 120 days, our expectation is they will announce re-shoring plans which will reduce [the tariffs] to 20 per cent,” one senior administration official said.

“We expect the lion’s share of the world’s patented pharmaceuticals to be building in America. This was not a secret, we’ve been talking about this endlessly over the past six months. Everybody knows it’s coming.”

The tariff announcement was timed to mark one year since Trump’s so-called Liberation Day, when he imposed sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs on almost all US trading partners. Those tariffs were ruled unlawful by the US Supreme Court in February.

The pharmaceutical tariffs are enacted under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act, rather than presidential emergency powers, and were not covered by the Supreme Court’s ruling.

Trump also adjusted tariffs on steel, aluminium and copper, which are currently set at 50 per cent and involve complex formulas for the steel component of various products.

Officials said that if a product has less than 15 per cent steel, the additional tariff will now be set to zero – but other tariffs still apply. If the product exceeds 15 per cent steel, the steel tariff will be 25 per cent on the total value of the product.

There are also moves to reduce what US officials said was an attempt to “fool the tariff process” by claiming the products were worth less than their real value.

A neo-Nazi leader who protested outside NSW Parliament, promoting a baseless conspiracy theory that the Jewish community paid bikies to firebomb synagogues for political gain, did not breach racial vilification laws, according to a NSW Police review.

Legal bodies have warned that the hate speech laws are vague and too complex, while the Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism Jillian Segal says they do not go far enough.

But the findings of a review by former Supreme Court judge John Sackar KC are being kept secret by the Minns government, which confirmed on Wednesday it would reject an order from the NSW upper house to release the report.

More than 60 black-clothed members of the National Socialist Network (NSN) gathered outside parliament on November 8 after submitting a protest application that was unopposed by police. They chanted “blood and honour”, a Hitler Youth slogan, and held a banner that read “Abolish the Jewish lobby”.

Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon told parliament, in an answer submitted on March 26, that “a subsequent review of the actions of the protesters conducted after the protest identified no offence”.

The Herald has previously chosen not to publish details from NSN leader Joel Davis’s speech at the rally, but believes it is now in the public interest, as NSW parliament considers new hate speech legislation.

Davis had shouted into a megaphone that the “Jewish lobby” and “Jewish-controlled media” had engineered a “fake antisemitism crisis” to justify hate speech laws.

He said attacks on synagogues were the work of organised crime.

“Who paid them? Who paid these bikies to firebomb synagogues?

“I think there’s one answer to this because who benefited: the organised Jewish community, which as a result passed several laws restricting criticism of them, their power, and their influence.

“The Jews do not want to be criticised.”

There is no evidence for Davis’s claims of Jewish involvement. Last year, ASIO director-general Mike Burgess said the agency believed that Iran sponsored several of the attacks on Australian soil.

The NSW government passed laws making racial vilification an offence in February last year, arguing it needed to act urgently to combat antisemitism. Two people have been convicted since the laws took effect in August.

In May, it commissioned a review to assess the laws and whether they should be widened to protect people against other forms of vilification.

Sackar, who previously led the NSW Special Commission of Inquiry into LGBTIQ hate crimes, handed his report to Attorney-General Michael Daley on November 5, three days before the neo-Nazi rally. The Coalition and the Greens have been calling for the report’s release since last year.

But the government has kept it secret for nearly five months, even as it introduced new laws to prohibit displays of support for Nazi ideology. After the Bondi terror attack, the government also set up a parliamentary committee to consider banning phrases such as “Globalise the Intifada”.

“While we are considering further changes to hate crime laws in parliament, it’s troubling that the NSW government refuses to share an independent review it commissioned into the very issues we are debating,” Greens upper house MP Dr Amanda Cohn said.

“A cynic might wonder whether the findings don’t align with the government’s approach.”

A Herald application under freedom of information laws was rejected because the report was deemed confidential to cabinet members. The government has cited the same cabinet confidence to reject an order from the upper house calling for the release of the report.

At a March press conference announcing stronger penalties for homophobic hate crimes, Premier Chris Minns said Sackar’s findings should not be released until the government’s position was finalised.

A spokesperson for Daley said the government considered all relevant advice while designing reforms to combat hatred and extremism, and the two convictions for inciting racial vilification prove the necessity of the new laws.

Legal groups told the inquiry that they shared concerns raised by the NSW Law Reform Commission, which recommended against introducing vilification offences in 2024.

We are concerned that it could be difficult to prove terms like hatred to the criminal standard,” the commission wrote, warning that a change “would introduce imprecision and subjectivity into the criminal law.”

The Law Society predicted police would be less likely to prosecute because of the complexity.

Segal, the envoy to combat antisemitism, urged changes that would lower the threshold for prosecution. These included a shift from “incite hatred” to “promote hatred” and removing the onus to prove a reasonable member of a targeted group would fear harassment, intimidation or violence.

Other bodies argued for laws to protect vulnerable communities vilified because of attributes such as religion, gender identity, sexual orientation and disability. “Current laws are too narrow and set the bar too high,” the NSW Women’s Advisory Council submitted.

The racial vilification offence was used to prosecute a speaker at a Sydney far-right rally in January, who described Jews as “our greatest enemy”. He was sentenced to 12 months’ jail.

Davis, the NSN leader, remains in custody charged with a federal offence after encouraging supporters online to “rhetorically rape” Wentworth MP Allegra Spender.