Australia news live: Albanese says Liberal MP Stuart Robert’s …

Bob Carr warns of Biden’s ‘cognitive decline’ and against Australia acting like American ‘client-state’

The former foreign minister Bob Carr has taken to Twitter to warn of the “frailty and cognitive decline” of the US president, Joe Biden, adding that attendance at major forums and conferences have been left to the “unsteady hand of the vice-president, [Kamala] Harris.”

Carr, who is also a former premier of NSW, also said that the Republican base was “loyal to Trump” and to “any heir of Trump”.

It comes after the US president informed the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, that the Quad meeting was cancelled because Biden had to be back in the US to negotiate Congress’s debt ceiling deadlock.

Carr also told the Australian newspaper that Australia needed to rethink its relationship with the United States and that policy makers needed to “factor in a serious uncertainty about projected American behaviour”:

Australia is suffering from being too compliant, too un-pushy, too like a client state. Biden won’t come here, and apparently flicks off our prime minister’s submission about Assange.

We were encouraged by the White House to talk-up the Quad and invest it with more substance that it has. It hasn’t even delivered on its promise for an Asian vaccine.

Act like a client state, get treated like one. We’ve got out of the habit of fruitful arguments with our coalition partner.