Albanese’s talking points on Modi didn’t help him much, documents reveal

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will surely be relieved his Indonesian counterpart — and biking buddy — Joko Widodo has been able to leave the country without too much incident.

In contrast, during the stadium tour visit of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in May, Albanese was repeatedly questioned about whether he intended to “stand up” to Modi over his human rights record. Documents released in response to a freedom of information request from Crikey show the government had anticipated these questions, but from what we can see, Albanese didn’t refer to his reading material much.

We’d be willing to bet that the phrase “biggest democracy in the world” is somewhere in the decent chunk of the talking points document that it was for some reason deemed necessary to redact. He said it several times during the interviews with Sunrise’s David Koch, Today‘s Karl Stefanovic and the ABC’s Michael Rowland when the issue came up.

That which remains states on three separate occasions that the “Australian government supports the right to freedom of expression everywhere”, and that it is “committed to freedom of expression and the freedom of the press at home and abroad” twice.

Albanese didn’t mention this freedom at all on Sunrise, but it did vaguely come up in the Rowland interview: “Here in Australia, of course, people have a right to express their views in a peaceful way, and people, we all have different views about people in politics. Australia, of course, always stands up for human rights, wherever it occurs anywhere in the world.”

Interestingly, Albanese ignored the example his talking points gave him of Australia’s apparent engagement with India on human rights “through the United Nations Human Rights Council’s universal periodic review”. Instead, when asked on the ABC if he intends to confront Modi, he took an opportunity to swipe at his predecessor.

“One of the things that I do is engage with people on a one-on-one basis … What I don’t do is leak text messages with other world leaders,” he said, a reference to the unfortunate trend of figures such as Emmanuel Macron seeing their private information find its way into the media.