OPINION
They don’t call Anthony Albanese “Each-Way Albo” for nothing. The Australian PM has earned that moniker as much as he has the “Airbus Albo” tag, because if there’s one thing Albanese is addicted to almost as much as buggering off overseas, it’s sitting on the fence on what ought to be morally clear issues.
Israel, for instance. The only democracy in the Middle East, currently under attack by mediaeval savages, including a massacre that would make an Einsatzgruppen veteran blink: Australia’s stance ought to be a no-brainer. As Labor great Bob Hawke said, if the bell tolls for Israel, it tolls for us all.
Albo is no Bob Hawke.
Instead, he’s Gough Whitlam without the front of Patrician grandeur: incompetent, socialist, and all-too-willing to pander to brutal communist dictators.
Anthony Albanese says China has become “far more forward-leaning” […] “China has changed its posture – that’s the truth,” Albanese told the Nine Network.
The Guardian
That was in 2021, when China had just unleashed a global pandemic, and was brutally punishing Australia for calling it to account.
Albanese’s wittering sounds even more ludicrous, now, when China demonstrates its “forward-leaning” by deliberately endangering Royal Australian Navy divers with sonar, while Albanese is busily kissing Xi Xinping’s backside in San Francisco.
Anthony Albanese’s position on China is becoming untenable. It’s inconsistent, incoherent, self-contradictory and frankly a little ridiculous.
Either the Prime Minister did raise with Xi Jinping China’s shocking actions at sea that deliberately caused the injury of Australian navy personnel, or he didn’t. Albanese’s later comments on Sky TV criticising China look like a now typical government effort to clean up a prime ministerial mess.
And China, make no mistake, is calling its lapdog to heel, with a furious denunciation and lying denial that the incident even took place.
There are only two possibilities on the Albanese/Xi encounter. Either the PM did not raise the naval issue with Xi, in which case the much ballyhooed new dialogue with Beijing is all but worthless, as we are apparently not allowed to raise issues where the Chinese military attacks our personnel.
Alternatively, Albanese did raise the naval incident with Xi, but is so scared of the Chinese president’s possible reaction that he won’t say so publicly.
If that is the case, the PM is extending a deference to Xi far beyond that extended to the pope, the late queen of England or indeed the US president.
Albanese’s stance is so patently untenable that he’s taken to making up yet another non-existent protocol: he can’t say what he raised with foreign leaders. Which is as obviously bullshit as his claim that he can’t talk about domestic matters while overseas (in other words: most of the time).
What’s plain is that Albanese simply isn’t up to his job.
Because Albanese has not demonstrated great command of detail in a number of press conferences, the tactic now seems to be to try to limit the difficult questions he might face. This is the Joe Biden strategy writ small. It’s awful.
The Australian
And it should have been obvious from the first week of the 2022 election campaign when Albanese simply started walking out of press conferences when the questions got too hard.
Australians thought they were getting rid of an incompetent, vacillating Prime Minister by dumping Scott Morrison — except, they elected Anthony Albanese. Just as Americans proved, when they replaced G. W. Bush with Barack Obama, the political barrel is never so empty that you can’t scrape lower.