Prime Minister commits foreign policy ‘faux pas’ by not announcing new Singaporean PM

Security expert Lincoln Parker discusses Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's foreign policy ‘faux par’ when he let his Foreign Minister Penny Wong break the news of the swearing-in of a new Singaporean Prime Minister.   Singapore swore in Lawrence Wong as its first new Prime Minister in 20 years, but Prime Minister Anthony Albanese failed to publicly congratulate his new counterpart. “You would have thought the Prime Minister of Australia would have welcomed the new Prime Minister in Singapore, but he left it up to the Foreign Minister Penny Wong,” Mr Parker told Sky News host Erin Molan.   “She put out something on Twitter, and immediately, you saw a lot of pushback saying, 'why isn’t the Prime Mister making these sorts of announcements'.   “It’s a little bit of a foreign policy faux pas, and we’ve really got to do better than that when they are a key ally, a strategic ally.   “We do a lot of trade with them, we import over 12,000 megalitres of petroleum through and from Singapore.”