Comment

Paul Bongiorno
Albanese aced his White House visit, but how reliable is Trump’s word?

Not for a very long time has a single meeting between a prime minister and an American president been such a pivotal event for a government and its opponents.

Anthony Albanese emerged from his rushed trip to Washington, DC, with his credibility in foreign relations and political nous enhanced – in no small way due to the Coalition’s unrelenting criticism for failing to secure a face-to-face meeting with Donald Trump in the nine months since his inauguration.

The framing was unforgiving: Opposition Leader Sussan Ley saw a failure of statecraft, a neglect of our most important strategic ties, and a “personal relationship between two leaders that needs to exist now, not later”. She described “a prime minister who is a complete bystander in all of this”.

Instead, after months of quiet diplomacy and identifying where the United States needs Australia as much as, if not more than, the other way around, a case was built for our strategic importance as a base in the Indo-Pacific and a supplier of critical minerals curtailed by Chinese embargoes.

Meanwhile, the Liberals’ tactics were encouraged, indeed urged on by News Corp’s tabloids and other platforms – particularly its conservative commentators on Sky News after dark. They retailed shrill messages of imminent danger from an increasingly assertive Beijing, and assertions of Albanese’s inability to deal with it.

This influence over the opposition is lamented by a leading Liberal moderate, who says too many of their colleagues are trapped in these unhelpful echo chambers.

Cabinet ministers are delighted that the narratives pursued for months about Albanese being a trade and security risk were, according to one, “all undone in a single day”. Nearly everything the opposition said was just plain wrong. The only caveat is, how reliable is Trump’s word? On that, all sides of Australian politics are in the same boat.

Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, who sat with Trump in the Oval Office seven years ago, gave Albanese 10 out of 10 for achieving the main objective of getting “in and out without mishap”.

Turnbull revealed that he offered a deal on critical minerals to Trump in 2018, but Washington didn’t want to progress it.

Timing is everything. Albanese got lucky with China “throttling ... rare earth exports” crucial to technologically advanced systems, Turnbull says, just as Canberra’s efforts to consolidate funding for two critical minerals projects in Western Australia and the Northern Territory were being finalised.

The Northern Territory project has significant backing from Hancock Prospecting, after Gina Rinehart invested $60 million in 2022 to fast-track it. She, like other investors, will profit from the transition to renewable energy, batteries and electric vehicles progressing at a pace pushed by the government – albeit opposed by Rinehart’s anti-net zero allies in the Coalition.

On AUKUS, Turnbull says Trump’s “full steam ahead” does not alter the reality of America’s shortage of attack submarines.

Turnbull says of course Trump loves AUKUS, because it is an amazing deal for the US. Australia is pumping in billions of dollars, and there is no obligation on a future US president to supply the submarines.

Another former prime minister, Paul Keating, agrees with Turnbull that China hawks in Canberra and Washington will be puzzled by Trump’s comment that AUKUS was unnecessary as a deterrent because President Xi Jinping will do nothing to threaten Taiwan.

Keating goes further, saying he believes Trump will not under any circumstances fight the Chinese. In an interview with The Australian Financial Review this week, he said Trump “has the peace consciousness, and ... is too street smart to pick a fight with Beijing”.

Such a war would inevitably escalate into a nuclear showdown where no one would be a winner.

All of this, according to Turnbull, validates Albanese’s efforts to stabilise relations with Beijing against the hawks in the Trump administration who prefer disengagement.

Craving anything to distract from its own travails and achieve some political cut-through, the Coalition had no such praise for the diplomatic effort.

In one of her first interviews responding to the Trump–Albanese “love-in”, Sussan Ley enthusiastically continued News Corp’s long campaign against Albanese’s hand-picked ambassador to the US, Kevin Rudd. She took her cue this week from Sky’s political editor Andrew Clennell, who asked Trump if the delay in meeting was due to the Australian government’s stance on Palestine, climate change or “even things the ambassador said about you in the past”.

Sky News insists its Washington contacts have established that Rudd’s now-deleted tweets – made before Trump was elected and describing him as “destructive” and a “traitor of the West” – were proving a problem for the White House.

Trump ignored Palestine and climate in the question and went straight to the Rudd element, affecting ignorance of who Rudd was, and asking Albanese if the ambassador still worked for him.

Albanese laughed and pointed to Rudd directly across from the president at the table. Trump asked Rudd if he had said bad things about him, and added, “I don’t like you either … and I probably never will.”

The exchange was greeted with laughter. After the cameras left, Rudd apologised and Trump said he forgave him.

Albanese dismissed the episode as “a joke”, but Ley countered that it was “untenable” for Rudd to remain ambassador and that the delayed meeting was “a failure of the ambassador”.

Albanese sees much of the success of the meeting and the signing of the US$3 billion framework for a secure pipeline of critical minerals and rare earths as very much a result of Rudd’s tireless diplomacy, particularly on Capitol Hill. The ambassador will see out his term until 2027.

Turnbull says Albanese is right to keep Rudd in Washington, and to bring him to the meeting, because “it showed strength of character”. According to Turnbull, “strength and power are the only things Trump respects”.

Resources Minister Madeleine King, who was at the cabinet room table, said she had worked countless hours with Rudd and his team on the project. Over a couple of days this week, she had witnessed the high regard in which the ambassador is held on all sides of politics – in the Capitol and in the administration.

King said Ley’s call for Rudd to be sacked was “an extraordinary, stupid example of overreach” and a return to the relentlessly negative approach of reactionaries such as former prime minister Tony Abbott and former opposition leader Peter Dutton. It is an approach pushed by the cashed-up conservative advocacy group Advance.

Ley would prefer to have controversy over Rudd in the media than the shambles the Coalition has degenerated into over the net zero emissions reduction policy.

The opposition leader is being pulled in opposite directions, with conservatives in both her own party and the Nationals believing that giving the government no quarter is the way to revive the Coalition’s fortunes. This is counter to her desire to make the Liberals more in touch with “contemporary” Australians.

Former Nationals leader and deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce infuriated moderate Liberals when he said in media interviews the opposition’s commitment to net zero by 2050 was a factor in the past two election losses.

Joyce is giving the Nationals’ commitment to net zero as a major reason for his inability to remain in the party room in parliament, or to sit with them in the House.

One colleague said Joyce must not have noticed Labor won both elections with that commitment, and the teal independents held on to their hitherto Liberal seats on a platform of stronger action on climate.

Some Liberals welcome Joyce’s quitting and see the campaign as noise coming from a loud minority of conservative MPs who managed to hold on to their seats because of their demographic profile in regional and rural Australia.

It’s a demographic that accounts for a diminishing base of about 15 per cent of the electorate, according to a Labor strategist. There is no way the Coalition, which needs a primary vote of about 42 per cent to win a federal election, can achieve this result unless it starts appealing to voters in urban seats.

On present trends, the next non-Labor prime minister is probably not in the parliament. Having moved in protest to the back bench, Liberal MP Andrew Hastie now presents as a “young fogey” on net zero who is prosecuting the Advance agenda. It’s an agenda that, despite a massive spend at the last election, failed miserably.

The latest Roy Morgan poll has One Nation making gains in all states except Victoria. However, as is the case in other polls, these gains are coming at the expense of the Liberals. Winning these voters back would still leave Sussan Ley – or whoever leads the Coalition, if it still exists, at the next election – well short.

Ley looks to be heading for ground zero unless she can pull off a miracle or Labor implodes. Neither prospect looks likely based on this week’s developments.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 24, 2025 as "Albanese trumps, Ley’s bets are off".

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