Last week, the US President honoured his election promise, indeed his long-held commitment, to increase tariffs on imported goods and services to the US. The formula they came up to differentiate between countries was bizarre but I don’t intend commenting on that here, except to say, the imposition of tariffs on the – Heard Island and McDonald Islands – which are an ‘Australian external territory’ that is a ‘a volcanic group of mostly barren Antarctic islands, about two-thirds of the way from Madagascar to Antarctica’ (where penguins live) ranked up there with their Signal chaos. These guys have access to the ‘red button’ after all. That’s the scary thing. Anyway I was sent a document that seemingly is the theoretical rationalisation for the tariff decision (thanks Mahaish, appreciated) and so I thought I would give it some time.