Albanese says trip by federal MPs to Taiwan is ‘not a government visit’
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has played down a visit to Taiwan by a bipartisan delegation of Australian politicians amid concern the trip will anger China after relations between the two countries have improved in recent months.
In the first visit by Australian MPs since 2019, the six federal MPs from the Coalition and Labor will fly out of Australia for Taiwan on Sunday.
Albanese on Saturday morning said there have been visits by backbench MPs for a “long period of time”.
“This is another one,” Albanese said at a press conference in South Australia.
“It isn’t a government visit; there remains a bipartisan position when it comes to China and when it comes to support for the status quo on Taiwan.”
Asked why the Australian MPs were going, Albanese said: “I have no idea. I’m not going. You should ask them.”
Unlike the former Coalition government, the Albanese government has been able to engage directly at a ministerial level with Beijing. But there are no signs that the billions of dollars in trade sanctions have been formally lifted.
Chinese authorities are still holding Australian citizens Cheng Lei and Yang Hengjun in prison.
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Taiwan was last year Australia’s eighth-largest trading partner, putting it ahead of any single European country.
In 2018, Albanese visited the self-governing territory alongside three other Labor MPs, where they met Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen.
Albanese last month met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in a significant breakthrough in relations after China imposed more than $20 billion of trade strikes on Australia during years of acrimony between the nations.
Justin Bassi, executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said allowing longer gaps between visits to Taiwan sets a reverse precedent that becomes harder to break.