Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says the leaders of Australia, the US, India and Japan will meet this weekend at the G7 summit in Japan.
A Quad country summit scheduled to be held in Sydney next week has been postponed after US President Joe Biden pulled out over debt ceiling negotiations in Washington, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says.
The leaders of Australia, India, Japan and the United States will instead meet this weekend at the Group of Seven (G7) summit in Japan, Albanian said Wednesday. Biden canceled a trip to Sydney on the second leg of his upcoming Asia-Pacific tour, which would also include a visit to Papua New Guinea.
Albanese said it was “disappointing” that Biden decided he could not come for the May 24 summit, which Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida would also attend.
“President Biden’s decision meant you can’t have a Quad leadership meeting if only three of the four are there,” Albanese said.
The four leaders plan to meet in Hiroshima at the G7 summit, he said.
“The Quad is an important body and we want to make sure it takes place at the leadership level, and we will have that discussion this weekend,” the prime minister said.
Biden “expressed great disappointment” at not being able to get to the top of Sydney and to the Australian capital Canberra to address parliament, Albanese said.
He said Modi will visit Sydney next week, noting that the Indian leader will address the Indian diaspora in a sold-out 20,000 seat stadium on Tuesday.
“Prime Minister Modi will be here next week for a bilateral meeting with myself,” Albanese told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. “He will also have business meetings. He will have a very public event… in Sydney.
The Quad is an informal group that promotes an open Indo-Pacific. China sees it as an attempt to curb its growing influence in the region.