Albanese is ‘pulling' Australia away from US amid China trip
'Honestly, the Prime Minister would look less desperate if he was trying to get Cardi B's autograph at the Met Gala,' Mr Morrow said.
'The problem here is that Anthony Albanese believes he can walk this sort of fine line where he has Australia do all sorts of trade with China … while at the same time enjoying the benefits of the American security umbrella.
'We don't have that language anymore, it seems, to stand up and say, actually, China, look, we'll do business with you, we'll trade with you, but you know what, under your current government … we can't trust that government.'
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Sky News AU
30 minutes ago
- Sky News AU
Security expert Michael Shoebridge claims Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's 'embarrassing' China play risking Australia's future
Strategic Analysis Australia director Michael Shoebridge has warned the Albanese government's "embarrassing" approach to China risks harming the nation's future. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is currently in Beijing for his second official visit to China and will meet President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Qiang on Tuesday. The visit comes amid significant scrutiny over how the government is managing ties with the United States, with some analysts suggesting Labor's approach to Beijing risked alienating the nation's most important ally. Speaking to Sky News Australia, Mr Shoebridge argued recent public demands from officials in the Trump Administration for Australia to up its defence spending and give assurances over the use of nuclear submarines were "a sign of the state of the alliance". Similar requests were normally made in private, the SAA director explained, making the recent calls "really odd". Mr Shoebridge suggested Mr Albanese's recent comments on China were unlikely to improve the situation, saying the Prime Minister did not "seem to know" the purpose of a key military exercise designed to help respond to threats from Beijing. "This is why so many American troops, along with other partners like Japan and South Korea, are turning up in Australia with this big Talisman Sabre exercise that's happening right when the Prime Minister is in China," he said. "He (Mr Albanese) doesn't seem to know what the purpose of the exercise is, but it's to be able to practise having military forces operate out of Australia to protect Australia and to conduct a military campaign in the region, most likely against China, and by doing that to demonstrate China shouldn't start a war." Despite pleas from a number of experts for the Prime Minister to take a harder line on China, Mr Albanese has instead used his latest trip to talk up closer trade ties with Beijing and encourage Chinese tourists to visit Australia. According to Mr Shoebridge, the failure to address security concerns was an "embarrassing" error, which could leave Australia in a precarious position. Referencing the Prime Minister's remark Australia depended upon "free and fair trade" the SAA director warned China could not be trusted to uphold its agreements and urged the government to diversify away from Beijing. "What a mystifying comment from the Prime Minister that we depend on free and open trade," he said. "Beijing does not engage in free and opened trade. Beijing hit Australia over the head with $20 billion of coercive trade barriers that it's now removed. Meanwhile, it's hitting the rest of the world over the ahead around rare earth access because it's weaponized its economy. "It wants countries to become more dependent on it so that it can use its economy as a weapon and the Prime Minister is signing up to have this done to Australia. It's embarrassing and it's a national interest error. "We are just being lazy and very short-sighted in doubling down on our trade dependence with China when we know China uses its economy as a weapon. The Europeans aren't doing this, Japan's not doing this. America's certainly not doing, but we are."
Sky News AU
30 minutes ago
- Sky News AU
Albanese's great betrayal: The alarming data that shows there is no end in sight to the housing shortage crisis
The numbers scream betrayal. Australia will fall 262,000 homes short of the government's own housing target by 2029. Other reports indicate the shortfall could total 400,000 homes in the capital cities. Some might label this as speculation. They're mistaken. At this point, it's a mathematical certainty. Anthony Albanese's government knew this was coming. They set the target: 1.2 million new homes by 2029. Bold promises, empty delivery. The rental market tells the real story. National vacancy rates sit at 1.2 per cent as of May 2025. That's crisis territory. Anything below three per cent spells disaster for renters. We're not even close. These rates remain 1.5 percentage points below pre-COVID averages. Young Australians know the truth. They're living it. Share houses at thirty. Multigenerational mortgage stress. Dreams deferred indefinitely. Many can't afford to leave home, not out of choice but necessity. Full-time work doesn't guarantee independence anymore. They're working harder, saving longer, and getting less. The ladder to homeownership might not have been torched, but the bottom rung has been quietly sawed off. The median house price continues its relentless climb. Wages don't. Simple arithmetic delivers crushing verdicts. A generation locked out of home ownership. Forever. Labor's response? Build apartments. Stack humans vertically. Problem solved, apparently. Wrong. This is not urban planning. Not the smart kind, anyway. It's bureaucratic crowd control dressed up as policy. Apartments jammed into dense lots, minimal green space, no long-term vision. The goal isn't to help people thrive; it's to make the housing crisis disappear on paper, to tick a box and call it progress. But Australians don't dream of concrete towers. They dream of Saturday morning lawn mowing. Children's laughter in backyards. Space to breathe. Privacy to exist. The apartment obsession ignores something elemental—how people actually live. Families need space to grow, not just square footage. Kids need backyards, not balconies. Parents need storage, quiet, parking, not communal bins and walls that carry every footstep, argument, and appliance hum. Three-bedroom apartments won't solve this. They're band-aids on arterial wounds—luxury-priced, politically convenient, and conceptually bankrupt. Australians want what their parents had. Modest homes on reasonable blocks. A patch of lawn. A shed out back. A place to park without circling the block. But today's policymakers have something else in mind, the kind of housing they'd never dream of inhabiting themselves. The kind they wouldn't raise their own children in. Tower blocks for the masses, leafy suburbs for themselves. And the consequences are already here. When people can't afford to live near where they work, society fragments. When young people can't afford to start families, birth rates collapse. When families are priced out of the market, the dream of upward mobility dies. A nation without children, without aspiration, is a nation in retreat. But solutions do exist. Australia is short on vision, but it's not short on land. Regional areas offer what cities no longer can: space, affordability, and the potential to build real homes, not cramped cubicles. Yet the regions remain neglected—underfunded, underconnected, underutilized. Jobs are sparse, services are threadbare, and infrastructure barely exists beyond the town sign. The answer is there, but it demands investment—leadership, not lip service. Smart countries build new cities. They don't cram everyone into a few mega-centres and then act surprised when crises unfold. They spread their populations strategically. They invest in infrastructure before the nightmare begins. They lay down roads, rail, and internet—not just in capital cities but in the forgotten regions too. They create opportunity across the map. They think 20 years ahead. Australia does none of this. For far too long, the current government has done nothing as cities swelled, costs surged and families were priced out. Sydney and Melbourne are bursting at the seams. Brisbane and Perth aren't far behind. And still, no new cities. No bold planning. Just higher density, higher prices, and higher stress. The government could act. It could release land, not drip-feed it to inflate prices, but actually make it available. It could fast-track approvals, not tie them up in years of bureaucratic purgatory. It could cut the red tape strangling builders. But it won't. Because this government is hooked on stagnation. It mistakes inertia for prudence. It governs like a property manager, not a nation builder. It wants tax receipts, not transformation. The Australian dream isn't dead, but it is being euthanised. Slowly. Bureaucratically. Smothered by incompetence and indifference. And as always, it's the young who pay the price. The renters. The first-home buyers. The would-be parents. Paying off someone else's investment portfolio. Watching the dream of a backyard vanish while politicians blame local councils and 'market forces'. There's nothing natural about this crisis. It's manufactured. Maintained. Managed by people too spineless to challenge the status quo and too visionless to build something better. Albanese's government had a chance. A mandate. The numbers. They chose failure instead. Future historians will judge this era harshly. They'll ask how a nation with so much space became a place where families couldn't afford to start, where a home became a luxury, where the middle class—the engine of prosperity—was gutted in real time. Young Australians deserve better. Something must change, or watch an entire generation simply give up. John Mac Ghlionn is a researcher and essayist who writes on psychology and social relations. He has a keen interest in social dysfunction and media manipulation.
Perth Now
2 hours ago
- Perth Now
PM urges work on green steel over red wine in China
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will raise Australian concerns over Chinese steel dumping as he urges industry leaders from both nations to work together to develop low-carbon steel production methods. At a roundtable of Australian iron ore producers and Chinese steelmakers in Shanghai on Monday, Mr Albanese will call on China to address an oversupply of steel in the global market. Excess Chinese steel production - the result of prolonged economic stimulus and weak domestic demand - has flooded the international market in recent years, squeezing producers in places such as the US and Europe, and precipitating allegations of dumping. Australia imposed anti-dumping duties on steel imports from China but the World Trade Organization found they were improperly applied. Mr Albanese knows Australian miners - and government revenue streams - are vulnerable to a downturn in the iron ore price. "As both countries co-operate to advance decarbonisation, we also need to work together to address global excess steel capacity," he will tell the roundtable on Monday morning. "It is in both countries' interests to ensure a sustainable and market-driven global steel sector." It's hard to overstate the Australian economy's dependence on the Chinese iron ore trade. China is by far Australia's largest export destination and iron ore is by far the largest component. In 2024, Australia shipped $104.8 billion worth of the ferrous metal to China - about a sixth of the total value of exports to all trading partners. In addition to Chinese oversupply, the iron ore industry faces another long-term challenge - climate change. Turning iron into steel is a highly carbon-intensive process, accounting for seven to nine per cent of global emissions. Efforts to create green steel are under way but scalability remains a challenge. "Steel decarbonisation presents a range of challenges," Mr Albanese will say. "What we need are enabling policy environments, extensive investments in research to develop new technologies and collaboration across academia, industry and government." With leaders from iron ore giants Rio Tinto, BHP, Fortescue and Hancock in the room, Mr Albanese will pay tribute to the green steel projects those firms have under way. Representatives from a host of Chinese steelmakers will also be present, including Qiu Yinfu, the general manager of Shougang, which is working with Rio on developing green technologies such as low-carbon sintering and blast furnace optimisation. Later on Monday, Mr Albanese will deliver a speech to a high-level business lunch before flying to Beijing for the next leg of his six-day tour. Australian red meat, rock lobster and red wine will be served at the lunch - three menu items that have found renewed favour in China after Beijing lifted trade sanctions on more than $20 billion worth of Australian imports. Mr Albanese will again reiterate the importance of interpersonal relationships between Australian and Chinese business leaders and ongoing dialogue in maintaining positive relations. "There is no fixed model for a stabilised relationship," he will say. "Our job is to make sure that we manage our relationship so that we can contribute to regional and global peace and prosperity."
