Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has blamed an “ideological disagreement” as US President Donald Trump targets Australia in a wave of fresh tariffs.

The White House is proposing new levies for 60 countries that it says are not doing enough to fight slavery in their supply chains.

Under the proposal, a 10 per cent temporary tariff imposed in February on Australian goods will rise to 12.5 per cent from July 24.

“The acts, policies and practices of Australia related to the failure to impose and effectively enforce a forced-labour import prohibition are unreasonable and burden or restrict US commerce,” US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer found in a report published overnight.

But Albanese said on Thursday the tariffs were unwarranted and would only push up prices for American consumers.

“There is an ideological disagreement where the United States administration has broken with what was a decades-long understanding that tariffs are not positive for the country that is imposing them,” he told the ABC’s AM program.

Albanese said the latest swathe of trade penalties from the US came without notice.

“We continue to use every opportunity that we have to advocate that US tariffs imposed in Australia are unwarranted,” he said.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers said Australia’s modern slavery laws were “world leading”.

“We maintain the position that these tariffs are unwarranted, they’re unjustified, and they’re inconsistent with our free-trade agreement with the US, and we’ve made that case repeatedly,” he said.

“When it comes to the specifics of the modern slavery laws, we’ve got world-leading legislation in place already to combat the evils of modern slavery.”

Trade Minister Don Farrell has spoken to Greer on the sidelines of the OECD ministerial meeting being held in Paris to argue the new import tax is unjustified.

It is understood there will be no change to existing tariff exemptions for Australian beef and gold.

Other American allies including Canada, Israel, Japan, New Zealand and the European Union, along with adversaries such as China and Russia, are also covered under the latest tariff ruling.

“The failure of our most important trading partners to address the importation of goods made with forced labour is unacceptable … we will no longer tolerate this disparity,” Greer said on Wednesday (AEST).

Nationals leader and opposition trade spokesman Matt Canavan said the tariffs were based on a “fig leaf” of justification.

“Just weeks after the US Supreme Court struck out the Trump administration’s first tariffs, the US launched an investigation of whether Australia fails to impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labour,” he said.

“Its report is a smokescreen to justify tariffs it clearly intended to put on in any case.”

Opposition Leader Angus Taylor blasted the “rotten” tariffs and said the US was wrong to impose them.

“There shouldn’t be tariffs like this imposed on Australia, and the United States shouldn’t do it… we fought with them in every war, every major war, they shouldn’t be imposing tariffs on us,” he said.

“It’s not what we want to see, and we’ll fight against rotten tariffs.”

Former Australian ambassador to the US Joe Hockey said he’d argued personally with Trump about his tariff policies and warned he was “not for moving”.

“America is running out of money, and they need to get it from somewhere. And the President of the United States is convinced that foreigners pay tariffs imposed by America, whereas in fact it is American consumers that pay higher prices,” Hockey told ABC Radio National on Thursday.

-AAP