Exclusive: The prime minister attended last year but won’t attend this year, despite the war in Ukraine and European support for Taiwan in doubt.
NATO’s secretary general Jens Stoltenberg said the leaders of Australia, Japan, Korea and New Zealand, the so-called AP4, would be invited for the second time to the trans-Atlantic bloc’s annual gathering., and the then-freshly elected Albanese attended.have learnt the prime minister will not travel to this year’s gathering set for mid-July in Vilnius, Lithuania.
Australia was alone in not attending at the ministerial level. David Dutton, a junior bureaucrat from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the deputy ambassador to NATO went in Wong’s place. “NATO has shown its ambition to strengthen ties with the AP4 and it is unquestionably in Australia’s interests to turn their ambition into an enduring reality,” he said., urging Europe to reduce its dependency on the United States and avoid getting involved in any conflict between Washington and Beijing over Taiwan, showed why an Australian voice was needed at the table.
Joel Hickman, a non-resident fellow with the Transatlantic Defence and Security program at the US-based Centre for European Policy Analysis, said Albanese’s decision was disappointing.
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