Tributes for ‘friend of Australia’ Joe Biden

Anthony Albanese says US President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the upcoming election race shows that he was putting America first.

Anthony Albanese delivers in Cairns, Queensland, on Monday. Picture: NewsWire / Brendan Radke

Anthony Albanese has praised Joe Biden for being a “great friend” of Australia and putting the interests of America ahead of his personal political ambitions, after the President announced he would not seek a second term – a widely expected move that has recast the US election contest.

Former Australian ambassador to Washington Arthur Sinodinos told ABC radio it was “necessary” for Mr Biden to withdraw from the presidential race and that his expectation was for Kamala Harris to win the Democratic nomination. “This has the potential to be a circuit breaker,” Mr Sinodinos said. “He had to go. The major negative he brought to the campaign was his age … it makes the Democrats potentially more competitive I think.”

Mr Albanese said that Mr Biden had “acted in what he considers to be the best interests of the United States of America. He is someone who, in January, will be able to retire from public life with an extraordinary record.”

The Prime Minister said Mr Biden would have a proud legacy and had governed at a difficult time when the global economy was still recovering from Covid and had been rocked by a rise in global inflation and energy prices as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“He has seen the United States through that without having a big recession that was predicted by many economists,” the Prime Minister said.

“He’s seen employment grow. He’s seeing wages growing. And he’s seeing a transition to clean energy as well.”

Mr Albanese said that Canberra and Washington were working more closely together due to the AUKUS trilateral security partnership and that the relationship on economic and climate change co-operation was also tighter.

“The Inflation Reduction Act is no doubt the most significant piece of legislation to reduce emissions introduced anywhere in the world,” Mr Albanese said.

The Prime Minister also said he knew Ms Harris and that she too was “a good friend of Australia” but that Australians would need to “wait and see what comes out of the Democratic Convention – and that is, of course, a matter for the US”.

Peter Dutton said Mr Biden had been a “great friend of our country and he has been somebody who has strengthened the relationship between our two countries”.

The Opposition Leader said Australia was a “small island nation … and the agreement that we have with the US is absolutely essential not just from a trading perspective but also for our security, in a period the Prime Minister rightfully describes as the most precarious since the end of the Second World War”.

Former Labor foreign minister Bob Carr said that, whoever the Democratic nominee was, they would be preferable to Donald Trump – arguing that any US president would simply “inherit the established view on Australia held by the sprawling foreign policy and defence bureaucracy”.

“Trump is capable of slamming NATO to smithereens and plunging the world into ruinous trade wars through his simple-minded view of tariffs,” he said. “Over 40 per cent of our GDP is generated by trade. We’ve got to be petrified of that. Because it doesn’t seem he can be talked out of it.”

Mr Carr was particularly concerned about the influence of Mr Trump’s 2024 running mate, JD Vance, saying he was a “39-year old idolater of Viktor Orban”, Hungarys’s far-right leader.

“By the way, JD Vance would seem to be far more extreme in his MAGA ideology than Trump. Remember what Steve Bannon said. In the MAGA movement, Trump is a moderate. The intellectual influences around JD Vance are ­extreme in their unorthodoxy.”