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Singapore: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will be here in Singapore on Friday night to deliver his most significant foreign policy speech yet.
The prime minister is the keynote speaker at the opening-night dinner for the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore on Friday.Credit: Bloomberg
Defence secretaries and ministers from the United States, China and elsewhere are heading to the plush surrounds of the Shangri-La hotel on Orchard Road for Asia’s leading security summit. But it is Albanese who has top billing, giving him a platform to lay out the Australian government’s world view at a time of heightened superpower competition and concern about the potential for conflict.
The Australian leader is the keynote speaker at Friday’s opening-night dinner, following in the footsteps of Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who delivered last year’s main address, and Malcolm Turnbull, who was the headline act in 2017 when he was the Australian PM.
In a nod to the weight being given to the occasion by Albanese’s office, his speech was finalised weeks ago. It will be followed by a weekend of high-profile appearances, including by US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin and China’s newish Minister of National Defence Li Shangfu, who is also set to make a “major speech” according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) which has organised the conference.
The events on stage, of course, are only part of the story at a gathering of such heavy hitters.
Even the seating chart at the dinner − and the more private sit-down affair at the Istana, Singapore’s presidential residence, on Saturday night − tends to be of interest. Then there is the frenzy of bilateral action that occurs on the sidelines, in wings of the hotel and suites booked out by the delegations.
From left to right, US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin, Singaporean Defence Minister Ng Eng Hen, and his counterparts, Australia’s Richard Marles and China’s Wei Fenghe at last year’s Shangri-La Dialogue.Credit: AFP
It was in a corner of the Shangri-La last year that Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Richard Marles met Chinese counterpart Wei Fenghe in the first such in-person discussion between ministers from the two nations in almost three years. Austin and Wei also met up during the 2022 edition, but there won’t be a similar get-together this weekend.