Australia's prime minister suggests he doesn't want to add to 2024's record year of elections
Anthony Albanese delivers his first back-to-work press conference of the year.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has given his first news conference of 2024 setting out his back-to-work agenda.
Asked if Australia might join the 40 or so nations heading to the polls this year, he strongly hinted that the election would be in 2025.
Around 40 per cent of the world’s population is expected to cast a vote in 2024, although not all votes are taking place in what are deemed democracies - Russia, for instance, is heading to the polls and the hot favourite to win is, unsurprisingly, Vladimir Putin.
Australians were last at the ballot box in October for the referendum on the Voice to Parliament which the Yes campaign, backed by Albanese’s Labor government, comprehensively lost.
The prime minister only narrowly won power in May 2022. He said that if it were up to him, he wouldn’t subject Australians to another federal election until 2026.
“The federal election is due in May 2025,” he told reporters.
“I think that our terms are too short with just three years.”
Albanese singled out the elections being held this year in the United States, Indonesia, India, the UK and for the European Parliament as ones of particular significance.
Notably, he did not mention Taiwan which heads to the polls in just over a week, kickstarting the globe’s turbo-charged year of voting.
What happens in Taiwan’s election is critical to global peace and the strategic competition taking place between the United States and China - the superpowers are jostling for the world’s top-dog status.
China’s President Xi Jinping said in his New Year’s address that the mainland would “surely be reunified” with the self-ruled democratic island of Taiwan. Xi has not ruled out using military force to achieve this goal.
Some China-watchers don’t believe that Xi would launch a military attack on Taiwan for many reasons, but mostly because it would crash the Chinese economy, as it would just as surely provoke an armed conflict with the United States.
But China did get a mention at Albanese’s press conference.
He strongly hinted that Beijing would continue to remove the trade tariffs that were imposed during the Covid pandemic when the former Morrison government asked for an inquiry into the virus's origins.
That call earned Beijing’s wrath. The CCP retaliated with massive tariffs on Australian wine, barley and other goods. Since Labor came to power with the goal of “stabilising” the China-Australia relationship, Beijing has gradually removed some of those duties, although not on wine, which unlike the grain industry suffered heavily from the sudden loss of the lucrative Chinese market.
Albanese did not specify which duties would be removed but the Labor government has been confident of a breakthrough on wine for some time now.
“We’ll see further advances in that this year as we saw at the end of 2023 - the removal of some of the impediments to some of the meat supplies going into China,” Albanese said.
No decision on coal to keep Ukraine warm
Russia has rained missiles over Ukraine this week in retaliation for the sinking of another of its warships in the Black Sea.
In his latest nightly address, Ukraine’s President Volodymr Zelensky said that Russia had fired nearly 300 missiles at Ukraine and launched a further 200 drone attacks since December 29.
“No other state has ever repelled such attacks, combined ones: both drones and missiles, including air-launched ballistic missiles,” Zelensky said.
Ukraine’s Ambassador in Australia Vasyl Myroshnychenko has asked Australia to send another shipment of coal to Ukraine, to help keep the country warm during the country’s bitter winter when temperatures can drop to minus 5 degrees Celsius.
Last winter Russia targeted Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in a deliberate attempt to try and freeze Ukrainians and sap their morale.
But Albanese had a different war in mind when he spoke on Wednesday morning in Sydney.
He said 78 documents relating to the 2003 decision by the then Howard government to lend Australian support to the war in Iraq were not handed to the National Archives in 2020 (when Scott Morrison was Prime Minister), for their release in 2023 under the 20-year rule relating to Cabinet documents.
“My government believes that his mistake must be corrected, that the National Archives of Australia should release all the documentation that had been provided to them,” the prime minister said.
“Australians do deserve to know the basis upon which the decision was made to send Australia to war.
“We know at that time this was an issue that did not have bipartisan support.”
When a journalist asked Albanese if a “cover-up” had taken place the prime minister did not dispute the characterisation and said this was why he had asked former bureaucrat Dennis Richardson to investigate.
Albanese only addressed the war in Ukraine when asked by a journalist if the government would agree to the Ambassador’s request.
“Look, we’ll give consideration,” he said.
“Next winter was what [the Ambassador] was talking about.”
Any government decision would need to be made around now to facilitate the donation.
The war in the Middle East between Israel and Hamas was not raised by either the media or the Prime Minister.
Israel killed senior Hamas operative Saleh al-Arouri in a drone strike in southern Beirut, Lebanon on Tuesday.