Australia’s Home Affairs Minister Clare O'Neil has been admonished for a social media post calling Donald Trump Jr. a “big baby.”
Turning Point Australia said the visa was only received late afternoon on July 5, just 24 hours before Mr. Trump Jr. was supposed to board his flight from Sydney, according to a statement.
Yet Ms. O'Neil stood by her department’s actions while criticising the former U.S. president’s son.
“Geez, Donald Trump Jr. is a bit of a sore loser. His dad lost an election fair and square—but he says it was stolen,” she wrote. “Now he’s trying to blame the Australian government for his poor ticket sales and cancelled tour.”
“Donald Trump Jr has been given a visa to come to Australia. He didn’t get cancelled,” she added. “He’s just a big baby, who isn’t very popular.”
The post was deleted hours later.
Senator Warns of Damaging US-Australia Relations
Opposition Senator James Paterson said Ms. O'Neil’s actions could spark a diplomatic incident.“Like it or not, Trump could be elected president again in less than 18 months,” he wrote on Twitter. “If that happens, I hope for the sake of the AUKUS agreement that cabinet ministers in national security portfolios are able to restrain themselves from juvenile tweets like these.”
Discussions around AUKUS began during the Trump presidency before being officially unveiled by the current U.S. President Joe Biden. The trilateral deal involves major technology sharing between the United States, Australia, and the UK and will see Australian naval forces armed with sensitive nuclear submarine technology.
Meanwhile, Mr. Paterson welcomed Ms. O'Neil’s decision to remove her “childish tweets.”
“The minister should leave the woke tweets to Labor backbenchers and get back to focusing on the serious national security challenges facing Australia,” he wrote.
Federal Labor Immigration Minister Andrew Giles backed Ms. O'Neil’s stance that there was nothing unusual about the handling of Trump Jr.’s visa.
“The visa was dealt with in the normal manner. Any issue that Mr. Trump has, or his promoters have that go to the postponement of the tour is a matter entirely for them,” he told reporters in Sydney on July 6.
“It may, of course, be that the reason for the postponement goes to the lack of enthusiasm for ticket sales, rather than any of the issues that they’ve raised,” he said, continuing the Labor Party’s narrative against the event.
The Epoch Times has reached out to the U.S. embassy in Australia for comment on the Home Affairs Minister’s Twitter post.
Attendees were advised on July 5 that the event had been postponed and new dates would be announced soon.
Andrew Cooper, the main organiser for the Conservative Political Action Conference—Australia, said visa delays were a common problem he faced with bringing speakers down under.
He said similar delays occurred last year when Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage only received his visa when he was boarding his flight.
“[The government] holds it back, and they delay it. So they will claim they didn’t dis-approve it, but that they processed it late,” Mr. Cooper previously told The Epoch Times.
“We have speakers getting delayed all the time.”
Labor Government Using Trump in Political Lines of Attack
The comments from Ms. O'Neil come as other members of the Australian Labor government continue to cite the Trump presidency in their political attacks on the opposition.Most notably, Indigenous Minister Linda Burney has cited Trump when discrediting groups who oppose changing the Australian Constitution in an upcoming national referendum.
“The Voice” proposal will change the preamble of the Australian Constitution to include recognition of Indigenous people and will embed a near-permanent advisory body into Parliament that will have the power to make “representations” on matters deemed relevant to Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders.
In response, “No” campaigner Warren Mundine, also an Indigenous Australian leader, said there was already much progress in Aboriginal communities.
“Since 1967, when we had the referendum [to remove ‘race’ from the Constitution] which was about equality, bringing Aboriginals in to be equal to the rest of Australia, and ending segregation, we’ve been on this magnificent journey,” he told 2GB radio.
“Since 2015, we’ve created over 3,000 Aboriginal businesses with the economy going from $6.2 million [in worth] to now $8.7 billion, and it’s employed 45,000 Aboriginal people and 37 percent of them in regional and remote Australia.”
