President Trump has spoken at the United Nations, and now Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has too.
The contrast could not have been starker. Trump rambled like a man who’d just been handed the microphone at a small-town karaoke night – except the song was foreign policy and he didn’t know the words. He wandered through half-baked grievances, boasted about imaginary achievements, and at one point seemed to forget which country he was president of.
Albanese, meanwhile, spoke like an actual world leader – calm, confident, and passionate. He talked about climate action, regional security, and cooperation with the kind of clarity that makes you think, “Ah yes, this person knows what he’s talking about.”
And yet, if you relied on Australia’s right-wing media, you’d think you’d just watched two completely different events. To them, Trump was basically Moses parting the Red Sea with one hand while balancing the U.S. economy on the other. Albanese, apparently “reckless,” was a bumbling tourist who accidentally stumbled into the General Assembly and asked for directions to Times Square.
One commentator even claimed Trump was “extraordinary” – which is technically true if you count all the diplomats burying their heads in their hands. Meanwhile, Albanese’s calm and measured speech was branded “utterly humiliating” and dismissed as nothing but “symbolic gestures,” because apparently international diplomacy should be performed like a WWE entrance.
This is the theatre we live with now: policy and substance don’t make headlines, but a man ranting about wind turbines does. If Trump had started selling selfies from the UN podium, they’d have called it “bold economic diplomacy.”
The world saw two very different leaders this week – one looking like he could chair a serious discussion about global challenges, the other looking like he should be gently escorted back to his seat before he accidentally sanctioned Canada.
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SKY is the only channel that provides 24 hour comedy, face it, we all need a little more laughter in our lives.
I note that Netanyahu got a platform at the UN General Assembly – quite an achievement I would have thought for a wanted criminal – and he ranted on about Hamas. Interestingly he didn’t direct his demands to anybody in particular in Hamas: do they actually have a leader or have he/they been assassinated, do they actually have a fighting force left, do Hamas actually exist anymore?
Noteworthy was that Netanyahu called for the immediate release of all hostages (I assume he was taking about those held both by Hamas and by Israel) but there was no commitment to a ceasefire, withdrawing troops, opening up human aid border crossings or a two-state revival.
The people of Israel have been let down once again by their leadership. The opportunity existed in New York at the UN to do something positive to assist the hostages and bring this futile conflict to a conclusion but again Netanyahu failed his people and the world – he seems more interested in harassing a flotilla of aid coming in by sea.
I sense some more ‘crying wolf’ from Netanyahu and I commend the many delegates who walked out.
Terry:
According to Netanyahu and the IDF, every single dead Palestinian (including the infants) was a Hamas leader. It was obviously a very top-heavy organisation.
Meanwhile, I have never seen so many locked and empty Facebook profiles as a random check of negative, one-line comments on the pages of the Australian, Daily Telegraph etc show.
I would like to know how the Palestinians supposedly talked dozens of diplomats into leaving the chamber when Netanyahu gave that ranting raving, and almost foaming at the mouth “speech”.
Narcissists are generally neither very self aware nor prone to embarrassment when they spin BS…