Stephen Smith’s phone call last year with his old Labor mate, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, was straight to the point. Albanese needed him to take up Australia’s oldest diplomatic posting as the 26th high commissioner to London.
from his role from outside of state parliament, famously declaring he thought McGowan was incapable of winning an election.
“I’m not going to get into a running commentary about who said what to whom over AUKUS,” he says. “I don’t regard public interventions by former prime ministers as doing anything other than underlying the fact that we’ve come from a robust democracy.” There is perhaps the tiniest of hints dropped about what, deep down, he thinks about Keating’s outburst. It’s rather subtle but still pointed. His political wilderness years were largely spent in academia and at think tanks, as a professor of public international law at the University of Western Australia, chairman of the UWA Public Policy Institute and on the board of the Perth USAsia Centre.
“I think I can say that, as you might expect, he was very friendly, very warm, very engaging, and keenly interested in all matters Australian,” he said. “As we know, he has a history of a relationship with Australia and schooling and living in Australia. So, he’s keenly interested in all aspects of Australian society.”
But Rudd sounded out Smith when he was in London last month, putting aside a sketchy history to ensure they were in lock-step when it came to delivering AUKUS.“He reached out because it made sense for the two of us to have a conversation because there will be connections and interlinkages with what we do,” Smith says. He says the pair didn’t “chat about old times” but how they could work smoothly to ensure AUKUS worked between Canberra, Washington and London.
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