Gee, it’s good to know that everything is just fine in Australia, right now. I mean, if there was anything really bad happening, like an energy crisis, an inflation crisis, or external threats from an aggressive dictatorship, surely the prime minister would be staying home to deal with it.
Not Anthony Albanese.
Since being sworn in as Australia’s prime minister, Albanese has spent fully a quarter of his time in office overseas. This is, remember, the opposition leader who vowed, “I won’t go missing when the going gets tough”. Now, he’s buggering off again, this time to Europe.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has confirmed he will visit French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris next week to formally “reset” diplomatic relations, which were flung into the freezer after the Morrison government scrapped a massive deal to build 12 submarines.
In an interview on the ABC’s 7.30, Mr Albanese said he was invited to France by Mr Macron and expected to receive a warm welcome.
Besides, Paris in summer is a much more attractive proposition than freezing through a bleak Canberra winter. Perhaps as he sips a nice Chablis in the June sun on the Rue Cler, Albo Everywhere will spare a thought for Australians praying that the lights and heaters will at least stay on through another winter night.
When he’s not busily kissing frog bums, of course.
Earlier this month, the new Labor government announced it had agreed to pay French shipbuilder Naval Group $835 million in compensation for the scrapped deal.
In total, $3.4 billion was spent on the program, a figure Mr Albanese labelled an “extraordinary waste” of taxpayer money.
“France, of course, is central to power in Europe, but it’s also a key power in the Pacific, in our own region as well,” Mr Albanese told Leigh Sales.
I’m trying to remember when France has actually taken a role as “a key power in the Pacific”. Apart, that is, from blasting atolls to smithereens with nuclear bombs, or blowing up ships in Auckland harbour. That’s in between shafting Australian (and New Zealand) primary producers through its EU trade laws.
And if we’re going to talk compo, perhaps we could just bill France for all the Australian lives sacrificed defending French soil, and call it quits. After all, 53,000 Australians died in France in WWI alone. If we write that off against the subs bill, it comes to just $65,000 per dead Australian. Bargain (for the French), really.
The submarine deal with France came at a time when Mr Macron was talking up the country’s future as an “Indo-Pacific power” fully committed to the region.
On a visit to Sydney in 2018, the President said the submarines were just the “very beginning” of a closer relationship with Australia that would be developed for “the coming 50 years”.
France is considered a key partner in efforts to limit China’s expanding power and influence in the Pacific.
Well, someone has to manufacture the white flags, I guess.
Meanwhile, the problems at home aren’t getting solved by Airbus Albo flitting off on overseas junkets.
A number of economists predict the government will have to start a difficult conversation about how the nation pays for the services Australians have come to expect.
“I expect the October budget will be simply about delivering on the promises they took to the election,” Danielle Wood from the Grattan Institute said.
ABC Australia
Surprise, surprise, globalist think-tank the Grattan institute thinks that the answer is: more taxes!
Tax and spend. It always works out so well for a Labor government.