Albo Can’t Live Down ‘Melon Gate’

Many years ago, I had a landlord whom I could only describe as an habitual liar. Here’s the thing, though: he mostly lied about trivial but demonstrably untrue things. For instance, on a first inspection of the property, he pointed out the large gas bottle for the heater: ‘One of those lasts me all winter.’ Before moving in, we asked how much it cost to fill: ‘Dunno, never use it’. And so on. It was all very weird.

The same could be said about Anthony Albanese, except that he’s not just a landlord (who, contrary to Labor’s class war rhetoric, summarily evicts long-term tenants when it suits his investment strategy) but the prime minister of a country. His lies, often bizarre and trivial, have consequences. Lying about falling off a stage, for instance, when we have direct video evidence, is weird but not particularly consequential.

Lying about making crude, sexualised jokes about the female leader of a close ally, when, again, we have it all on video, on the other hand, is deeply consequential. At a time when both nations are under increasing threat from a belligerent communist superpower. It’s not just weird and embarrassing: it’s an international scandal.

Anthony Albanese insists his remarks about Japanese leader Sanae Takaichi’s “melons” were not a crude joke, as Tokyo’s former ambassador in Canberra, Shingo Yamagami, warns the “insulting” comments have damaged the prime minister’s standing in Japan […]

He says while Ms Takaichi is used to derogatory remarks about her body and gender from the Chinese and her political opponents, “the last thing she expected was to be so casually mocked by the trusted leader of Japan’s special strategic partner”.

She obviously hadn’t paid much attention to this clown’s track record, then.

“However lighthearted it was intended to be, the recent joke delivered by PM Anthony Albanese at the expense of Japanese PM Sanae Takaichi is how he might be remembered by Japanese who most value the friendship with Australia,” he writes.

The retired diplomat and former intelligence service boss, who served in Canberra from December 2020 to April 2023, says the foundations of the Australia-Japan relationship “are rock-solid” and won’t be weakened by Mr Albanese’s comments.

But he says the remarks showed “a paucity of strategic thinking” when the countries need to work more closely together to counter Chinese aggression through initiatives such as the Quad – a strategic bloc bringing together Australia, Japan, the US and India.

“It is a time for toiling and not for crude jokes at another’s expense,” he says.

Toiling, though, is not exactly in Albanese’s DNA. Apart from a short stint in the backrooms of an investment bank, most of his early life was spent bludging around the world. Then he got into politics, where his first act as PM was to… go bludging around the world, earning himself the sobriquet ‘Airbus Albo’.

He’s earned a lot more nicknames since, few of them complimentary.

“Paucity of strategic thinking” could also be his and his government’s mission statement. Whether it’s letting Boofhead Bowen and his demented ‘Net Zero’ obsession destroy our defence-critical industrial and energy infrastructure, presiding over the slow collapse of the Australian Defence Force under the weight of woke bureaucracy, pandering to violent antisemites funded by terror regimes or just being so clueless that the Chinese navy could sail an entire fleet firing live weapons past us and it took a commercial airline pilot to notice, this clown-show government couldn’t have weakened us more if they tried.

Maybe Albanese’s Labor aren’t Chinese fifth-columnists, but if they were, what exactly would they be doing differently?

[Mr Yamagami] also calls out Mr Albanese’s failure to attend an event marking the 50th anniversary of the Nara Treaty, which anchors the nations’ relationship, while suggesting Labor has been too meek in its dealings with Beijing.

“There is much we need to do and confront. When it comes to squarely addressing the challenges posed by an increasingly aggressive China, Australia has no monopoly on China sycophants,” he says.

“China’s formidable infiltration campaigns, including the surreptitious use of money and honey traps, are worryingly effective and affecting policymakers in major democracies. That said, stabilising relations with China should not prevent any nation from calling a spade a spade.

“Silence is often taken by Beijing as acquiescence and a sign of weakness. Australia and Japan know this intimately, since both countries have had to bear witness to the People’s Liberation Army’s live-fire exercises off their coasts and its launch of submarine-launched ballistic missiles into the South Pacific.”

If it’s any consolation, Australian voters are more and more itching to wash their hands of this international embarrassment of a government.

Labor’s primary vote has plunged to Julia Gillard-era levels after falling to 29 per cent, with Anthony Albanese’s popularity remaining at near-record lows since the 2022 election and One Nation maintaining its dominance over the Coalition.

While the legacy media have been desperate to amplify fluctuations in One Nation’s support as, supposedly, signs of a collapse in the party’s support, their recent poll drops have been well within the margins of error, amounting to little more than the sort of noise one would expect. Labor’s continued slide, on the other hand, is well outside the margin of error. Starting from a low enough base of a near-record low primary vote, one which would have consigned them to a humiliating defeat in the face of a viable opposition, Labor’s fortunes are only getting worse. Now, they’re moving into the sort of poll territory that presaged the landslide defeat meted out to Julia Gillard in 2013.

The PM’s personal approval rating simultaneously collapsed to -22.

Labor and One Nation are now neck-and-neck in the polls. The coalition, meanwhile, are becoming an irrelevance, slumping to just 18 per cent. Drop a few more, and they’ll be slugging it out with the Greens for the wooden spoon.