Lukas Coch\/AAP<\/a><\/p>\nAfter a planned meeting in Canada fell through, Australian government sources and the prime minister himself talked up the opportunity this UN week would present. <\/p>\n
A likely meeting certainly seemed imminent when the president, in attacking ABC correspondent John Lyons last week, suggested he\u2019d soon see Albanese. \u201cYour leader is coming over to see me very soon. I\u2019m going to tell him about you,\u201d Trump said.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s anyone\u2019s guess why Albanese is not on the announced New York schedule. It could be the president is too busy and the claims of other leaders are more pressing. Or that he is dismissing Albanese for the moment, for any one of a number of reasons.<\/p>\n
Of course Trump is critical of Australia recognising Palestine, but then, so has the United Kingdom and that\u2019s not affected Trump\u2019s positive relationship with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer. The Palestinian question is one of the major issues Albanese is pursuing this week. He told the Two State Solution Conference at the UN, \u201cwe must break this cycle of violence\u201d.<\/p>\n
Perhaps Trump doesn\u2019t rate Australia highly enough to go out of his way to accord it any special respect, seeing it as just that useful country down under.<\/p>\n
Whatever the diplomatic implication, another failed date night wouldn\u2019t do Albanese any harm domestically. Australians are, for the most part, anti-Trump.<\/p>\n
But that should not be the measure. What\u2019s more relevant is that we are, strategically, in a highly uncertain region, elevating the importance of trying to understand where the US is at.<\/p>\n
Reinforcing the point, Albanese has had two recent failures diplomatically. A proposed $500 million deal with Vanuatu fell over and, more significantly, the prime minister was unable to sign a much talked-up defence deal with Papua New Guinea. The government says it is confident the PNG agreement will be signed soon, but delay always opens the possibility of slippage and the Chinese are urging PNG not to sign it.<\/p>\n
Three diplomatic misses in as many weeks? Not a good look.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile at home, it wasn\u2019t surprising Sussan Ley reiterated a Coalition government would withdraw recognition from Palestine.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
What was surprising was that Ley reached out directly to the 25 members of the US Congress who had written to Albanese and other leaders objecting to their countries\u2019 recognition.<\/p>\n
Ley said in her letter the recognition \u201cdoes not enjoy bipartisan support here in Australia. The Federal Opposition opposes this decision.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is also important to note it does not reflect the view of a majority of Australians,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n
\u201cAccording to the reputable Resolve Political Monitor, just 24 per cent of Australians support recognising Palestine at the United Nations General Assembly. 44 per cent of Australians do not support changing Australia\u2019s previously longstanding and bipartisan position on the recognition of a Palestinian state. 32 per cent of Australians believe recognition should only occur once Hamas is removed from power and when Palestinians recognise Israel\u2019s right to exist.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ley\u2019s letter breaks the convention (which admittedly some reject as old-fashioned) of keeping the arguments about foreign policy on home ground \u2013 the so-called dictum that \u201cpolitics stops at the water\u2019s edge\u201d. Ley looks to be venturing onto to foreign soil, figuratively speaking, to play domestic politics.<\/p>\n
For its part, the Israeli government has been quick this week to wade into Australia\u2019s internal partisan politics. The Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa\u2019ar contacted Ley to talk about the recognition, and bilateral relations between Australia and Israel.<\/p>\n
The Middle East conflict continues to produce ever-widening fractures in Australian politics and the Australian community.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The foreign policy performances on both sides of politics currently have a dash of the amateur hour about…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":163696,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-163695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163695"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163695\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/163696"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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