Every Friday, we wrap up the week with Rhiannon down he's on the phone, the political reporter for The Australian. Good morning to you. This is the week that was in camera. Let's get it started with, Well, where do you want to start?
A big meeting didn't end up happening.
We had the long awaited G seven summit where Albernezi, our Prime minister, was you to have his first meeting with Donald Trump face to face to discuss tariffs and orcurse. But despite being highly anticipated in the media for months or weeks, I should say, it didn't end up happening.
Donald Trump canceled at the minute and left him hanging because of the Middle East conflict, which I imagine was very disappointing for the Prime Minister and the government because they were very keen to negotiate an exception from those tariffs that have been causing them so much grief. Apparently he didn't receive he did not receive a call from Trump
personally afterwards, which some leaders did, which is unfortunate. However, Athne Albernize is now considering going to a NATO summit in the Netherlands soon to meet Trump in person.
He's certainly keen to make up for that lost meeting.
He sees it as very critically important as way of assuring the nation that he's a capable economic manager and able to negotiate.
An exemption ursued tariffs.
However, there were some successes for Anthony Albernizi in terms of he did meet with some EU officials to discuss a new Security and Defense Pact, which is something that's on the table, so certainly some closer ties with Europe emerging out of that G seven summit.
Jim Chalmers went to the National Press Club. How did he go?
Just a week after Anthony Alberanzi gave his own presentation at the National Press Club, which I'm sure he was very keen to get him first. The Treasurer, Jim Chalmers has now done his He did that on Wednesday and it was really I mean, he talked up his achievements after his first term as Treasurer and sort of talked about the mandate in the next three years ahead.
So it was certainly, you know, very.
Like it was a bit of a victory life, I'd say for the treasure He sort of talked about the government's track record of bringing down inflation while making sure that unemployment didn't rise, so certainly the government's had some successes.
He also sort of tried to temper this with this.
Idea of you know, there's a lot of global volatility, there's tariffs, there's all over the world now. And he also talked up this productivity roundtable that's coming up in August where they're going to bring all these prominent business leaders and economic leaders and sot of discussed how to get the nation's productivity sort of out of the duldrums that it's in.
So certainly it was a well received speech for Jim Chalmers. He did also make a few interesting admissions. He said that the budget as it is is not sustainable.
We've got spending sort of falling short of all the big ticket items the government needs to fund, like the care economy, that's age care, health indies, all those things. Defense is another big one at the moment. And he talked about this idea of tax reform, which is very interesting. Labor certainly steered clear of tax reforms early in the first term. And he sort of flagged this suggestion that you know, everything should be left on the table, the possibility of looking at GST.
But he also talked about this idea of consensus.
He said that failures to get productivity out of the gutters or reform the economy won't be because of a lack of courage.
It'll be because of.
A lack of consensus, and consensus will be the key thing here.
He talked a lot about this topic. We've got already, we've got.
The coalition, James Patterson, the Finance Minister, coming out saying that this is sort of code for labor, saying they want to raise taxes. So we'll see how that goes, this idea of tax reform, and this has been this week in camera