Let Donald Trump make mistakes: John Howard

John Howard says the Australian-US alliance “transcends” each nation’s leader as tensions rise following the Helsinki summit.

John Howard believes the world has to let Donald Trump make mistakes, after his much-condemned press conference with Vladimir Putin.

The former Australian prime minister said the US president had clearly made a mistake when he said he believed Russian President Vladimir Putin over his own intelligence agencies.

“I thought he was wrong to have said what he did but he’s now dealt with that and the important thing is to understand that people shouldn’t take sides too much on Mr Trump,” Mr Howard told reporters in Adelaide on Wednesday.

“I think one of the problems with the attitude around the world of Donald Trump is that people are either totally for him or totally against him. “He’s got to make mistakes and he did make a mistake on this occasion.” President Trump stood alongside Mr Putin in Finland and said he was taking the former KGB officer’s word that he didn’t interfere in the 2016 presidential election.

US intelligence agencies have found evidence showing Russian agents actively interfered with the 2016 election.

“I am no admirer of Vladimir Putin,” Mr Howard said.

Mr Howard also said the alliance between Australia and the US was “rock solid”. “That alliance transcends the occupants of the highest office in the two countries,” he said.

Earlier, Assistant Home Affairs Minister Alex Hawke said it’s hard to see why Mr Trump felt the need to use a “double negative sentence” to call Russia to account.

In a remarkable backflip overnight, Mr Trump said he now believes US intelligence agencies when they say that Russia was guilty of interference in the US election.

Mr Trump claimed that he “misspoke’’ during the press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki about Russian interference.

He said he now “accepts’’ the long-held view of US intelligence agencies which have found that Russia was guilty of the hacking and linking of emails during the 2016 campaign.

At the press conference in Helsinki, Mr Trump said didn’t see any reason why it would be Russia that interfered.

But he told reporters in the White House: “The sentence should have been ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia,’ sort of a double negative.”

Mr Trump’s comments come after the Australian father of three children killed when a Russian missile shot down the commercial plane they were travelling in slammed Mr Trump’s deference to Mr Putin.

Anthony Maslin’s open note to the US President came on the fourth anniversary of the tragedy.

Assistant Home Affairs Minister Alex Hawke. Picture: Kym Smith

Mr Hawke said it was disappointing to see Mr Trump’s comments on the anniversary of the MH17 tragedy.

“I think the Prime Minister expressed that well yesterday, confirming Australia’s interests are to see Russia held to account for the downing of that plane, and the murder of our 38 citizens, and the Russian involvement in that incident, but we’ve seen today of course a new story emerge about the situation and we’ll wait to see those developments like the rest of the world, although it’s hard to see why you’d need to use a double negative sentence to really call to account Russia for some of the serious things that have been going on in the world,” Mr Hawke told Sky News.

Labor leader Bill Shorten said Mr Putin had questions to answer about the shooting down of MH17.

“I don’t think they’ve ever fully come clean on that, so I’ve got to say I’m not the Russian President’s biggest fan at all, and I think he needs to be a lot more candid with Australia about what happened to that plane,” Mr Shorten told Hit FM.

US President Donald Trump. Picture: AP

Labor frontbencher Mark Butler said Australia’s longstanding and deep relationships with intelligence and security agencies in the United States were very important to regional and global security and would endure.

“Obviously there is a fair bit of fallout from Donald Trump’s summit with President Putin,” Mr Butler told Sky News.

“Across the major party lines here in Australia there’s quite a deal of suspicion about Mr Putin, or President Putin, particularly four years on from the aggression, the appalling downing of MH17, the loss of 38 Australian lives among the 298 passengers on that airline who lost their lives that day, not to mention a range of other things that Russia has had the finger pointed at them for over the last few years: involvement in the US election, the use of nerve agents in Britain and suchlike.

“So across the major party lines there is a great deal of concern about Russia’s activities across the globe, but the relations with the United States transcend any one leader on either side of the Pacific.”

With AAP