Anthony Albanese has dismissed a suggestion that his ambassador to the US, Kevin Rudd, should explain to the Trump administration the prime minister’s intimate meeting with Xi Jinping, details of which were revealed in this masthead.
Host of the ABC’s 7.30 program Sarah Ferguson spent the first portion of her interview with Albanese on Monday night asking about last week’s lunch in Beijing.
Donald Trump loomed large over the meeting between Xi and Albanese.Credit: Michael Howard
This masthead reported on Monday the pair discussed their upbringing and global outlook in a humour-filled discussion the Australian prime minister said had fostered “an element of trust”.
Asked if US officials had raised any questions about closer relations between Albanese and China’s paramount leader, Albanese said “No”.
Here’s a section of the exchange:
Ferguson: “Can I come back to that question of trust? Because I do think it’s an unusual word that you’ve used, and I want to know what you think that that word means, apart from having a slightly advanced, developed relationship with him. Would he, for example, take a phone call from you in the event of a crisis blowing up over Taiwan to discourage him from invading or blockading Taiwan?”
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Albanese: “Well, that’s a hypothetical which I’m not going to go into. But I have said before that anything that he has said to me has been fulfilled. There hasn’t been any breaches of personal commitments that he has given to me. That doesn’t mean he’s agreed with everything that I’ve put forward – far from it. But I’d rather that than someone on an international level saying, ‘Yep, we can do all that’, and then doing the opposite.”
Ferguson: “So you trust him that, when he says something, he’s going to keep his word?”
Albanese: “I have no reason to point to any breach that has occurred up to this point.”
Ferguson: “That’s about the past, what about the future?”
Albanese: “Well, all I can do is talk about the past. I can just talk about facts rather than going forward – we don’t know what it will bring. We know there are significant differences. China and Australia have different political systems. We have different values. We have our alliance with the United States which is very important.”
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