Until early this week there was substantial support in the Australian community for the view that Anthony Albanese and his Foreign Minister Senator Penny Wong had performed very well in the area of foreign affairs.
Australia has not made any concessions with respect to China and the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, while trying to improve relations between Beijing and Canberra. And Australia has continued as the most significant non-NATO supporter of Volodymyr Zelensky’s democratically elected government in Ukraine. Moreover, Wong has approached Australia’s relationship with the nations of the southwest Pacific with energy and appropriate tact.
And then there is Israel. Last Monday afternoon, David Hirst in the left-wing Guardian Australia reported that “Australia has quietly dropped its recognition of West Jerusalem as the capital of Israel”. He did so after drawing attention to the fact that the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade had deleted two sentences from its website which were placed there some years ago.
It’s not clear whether this was the result of journalistic discovery or whether the paper received a tip-off from DFAT and/or someone close to the government. In any event, the resulting mess was unfortunate for the Albanese government and the Australia-Israel relationship.
Read the article by Gerard Henderson in The Australian.