Failing the Curtin test

Albanese lacks the courage to lead at a time of global uncertainty

Reports emerged from London at the weekend that Chancellor Rachel Reeves has been shuffling pictures on the walls of 11 Downing Street.

Churchill's portrait, which hung above the fireplace in the dining room, has been replaced with a woollen tapestry depicting the stylised multicoloured head of an unknown woman.

Reeves’ decision to replace an image of Britain’s greatest wartime leader with a DEI pick hardly sends the reassuring message we were hoping for.

Global tensions are rising, and no Western leader seems to have a clue how to respond.

Chinese warships carry out a drive-by shooting in the Tasman Sea and our Prime Minister shrugs his shoulders. China signs a comprehensive economic and diplomatic agreement with the Cook Islands right under NZ's nose. Cook Islanders have NZ passports and fly the NZ flag, but successive NZ governments remained mute while the Chinese built a courthouse and police headquarters.

It would be fair to say that 2025 is not meeting expectations. We hoped that the inauguration of a cognitively functional US president would make the world a safer place. It hardly feels like one after Donald Trump's performance in the Oval Office on Friday, where he appeared to be auditioning for a remake of The Godfather.

The ill-tempered exchange between Trump, Vice President J. D. Vance and Volodymyr Zelenskyy may indeed have been "great television" as the President boasted, but some of us prefer diplomacy to be dull.

The test of the success of Friday's gathering was not the ratings or who sent who away with a flea in their ear, but whether a just end of this horrible war is nearer than when the meeting began.

Who knows, Trump may still be concealing his actual hand in a devious game of poker the rest of us are too stupid to understand. Perhaps his chief adversary is Vladimir Putin, and not the hapless President of the country Putin invaded. Perhaps Trump does accept that the US and its allies stand on one side of the axis of evil and Russia stands on the other in the company of China, Iran, and North Korea.

You’d be foolish to bet your house on it after Trump’s display on Friday. The Russians were ecstatic at Valensky’s humiliation. “The insolent pig has finally