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‘We will simply disconnect’: Mike Pompeo and the Australian TV appearance that caused a diplomatic storm
A comment by the US secretary of state about Victoria’s belt and road project has ricocheted through Parliament House and the US embassy
Daniel Hurst
@danielhurstbne Email
Mon 25 May 2020 03.10 EDT Last modified on Mon 25 May 2020 03.40 EDT
When US secretary of state Mike Pompeo popped up on Australian television over the weekend it was not to be interviewed by the national broadcaster or indeed one of the main TV channels.
Instead he chose to appear on a fringe show with a relatively tiny audience hosted by a self-styled “outsider” who loves Donald Trump’s tweets almost as much as he loves railing against “the left”.
To the aides who booked the interview with one of the conservative commentators on Rupert Murdoch’sSkynews channel, this may have seemed a quirky but low-risk environment: Pompeo was unlikely to face tough questioning about the Trump administration’s own performance during the Covid-19 crisis and would be given space to criticise China’s lack of transparency over the origins of the pandemic.
Imagine the surprise in the US state department and in the halls of power in Australia, then, when Pompeo appeared to leave open the possibility of suspending some forms of information sharing with Australia, a steadfast American ally, over the state of Victoria’s possible future involvement with Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative.
The US embassy in Australia was forced to clean up the damage within hours by making clear the US had “absolute confidence in the Australian government’s ability to protect the security of its telecommunications networks and those of its Five Eyes partners” and Pompeo was simply answering questions about “very remote” hypotheticals.
So how did it all go wrong?
Outsiders, which airs onSkyNews Australia each Sunday morning, styles itself as an anti-establishment program that challenges other media and climate science. The same day Pompeo appeared, it also featured an interview with George Papadopoulos – the former Trump adviser who claims he was the victim of a “deep state” sting – along with a regular segment called “ice age watch” that attacks “global warming cultists”.
Outsiders attracted 92,000 viewers around Australia on Sunday. While this was the highest-rating pay TV show that day, it was still dwarfed by the audience of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s flagship Sunday morning political talk show Insiders, which had about four times as many viewers.
Of the three co-hosts who launched Outsiders in 2016, only Rowan Dean remains, after the other two were forced out over scandals. Dean, the editor of the conservative Spectator Australia magazine, began the interview by asking Pompeo whether “the coronavirus unwittingly exposed the real face of Chinese communism”.
The focus soon shifted to a proposal by the Victorian state government to explore opportunities to cooperate with Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative – an emerging partnership that has attracted domestic political criticism, and is viewed warily in Australian national security circles.
Moar at:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/25/we-will-simply-disconnect-mike-pompeo-and-the-australian-tv-appearance-that-caused-a-diplomatic-storm