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Albanese was in Fiji on Monday for a leader\u2019s meeting with the country\u2019s prime minister, Sitiveni Rabuka. He was due to travel to Solomon Islands this week to meet that country\u2019s leader, before returning to Brisbane to host the leaders of Tonga and Papua New Guinea at the rugby league State of Origin decider.<\/p>\n
He was reportedly criticised by politicians including the independent Zali Steggall and the Liberal shadow minister Sarah Henderson for the podcast comments. The Australian newspaper reported that Steggall had said it was \u201centirely inappropriate for the prime minister to participate in such a game\u201d and Albanese should \u201clearn to push back, lead by example and call it out as sexist\u201d.<\/p>\n
Henderson reportedly said Albanese\u2019s remarks were \u201cdisrespectful to women, embarrassing to Australians, and demean the office of Prime Minister\u201d.<\/p>\n
The acting prime minister, Richard Marles, defended Albanese\u2019s record on gender equality when asked about the interview, which he said was a \u201cdifferent\u201d kind of conversation than the ones politicians normally had.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe prime minister has apologised unequivocally, so that\u2019s the first point to make,\u201d he told Radio National. \u201cI think from time to time we do interviews, which are obviously different to the one that you and I are doing now.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe government that the prime minister leads is the first government in our nation\u2019s history which has had an equality in terms of the numbers of men and women in cabinet. It\u2019s the first government ever to have had a majority of women in the caucus. Under this government the gender pay gap is the lowest that it has ever been on record. I mean, our prime minister is utterly committed to the place of women within our society and the elevation of women in our society.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Liberal frontbencher Andrew Bragg, also speaking on Radio National, said Albanese\u2019s remarks were \u201cbeneath his office \u2026 he shouldn\u2019t have said them.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Anthony Albanese has apologised \u201cunequivocally\u201d for his comments while playing a \u201cshag, marry, date\u201d game on a comedy…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":781491,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,44],"class_list":["post-781490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/781490","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=781490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/781490\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/781491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=781490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=781490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=781490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}