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Cabinet rooms are typically places of great secrecy. Ministers sit around the table, thrash out policies and then emerge speaking with one voice.
In Donald Trump's America, it's more performative than secretive.
Inviting cameras in to the meeting this week, for almost two hours, journalists lobbed questions at the president as his secretaries largely sat in silence.
Streamed live on YouTube, the White House broadcast looked much like a traditional news broadcast, with the strap across the bottom encouraging viewers to text "POTUS" in order to receive "updates from the Trump White House".
Given what came next, no shortage of governments could be forgiven if they found themselves reaching for their phones and texted a shorter, three letter acronym starting with W.
Without any firm details, Trump waxed lyrical about a 200 per cent tariff he planned to impose on pharmaceutical imports. When? Well, who can say. Maybe a year, maybe 18 months. Details schmetails.
The news was emerging back in Australia as Treasurer Jim Chalmers was getting ready for an interview on RN Breakfast.
Until then, he had been preparing to speak about the Reserve Bank's decision a day earlier to shock the market and households and not cut interest rates. But as is so often the case, the omnipresent US president's actions had the treasurer urgently seeking details.
Asked about the news coming from DC, Chalmers spoke of the grave concerns he held for Australia's pharmaceutical industry, whose exports heavily rely on the United States.
He insisted Australia's Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (which subsidises medicines, making them cheaper for Australians) would not be up for negotiations, no matter how much big American pharma vents its frustration at the scheme that it calls "socialised medicine".
Trump's earlier imposition of tariffs have done little to tame Australia's most lucrative export to the US — beef ($4 billion).
Pharmaceuticals are Australia's third largest export and worth around $2 billion. What concerns the sector is its exposure to the US market.
Around 40 per cent of all Australian pharmaceuticals go to the US. Of that, about 90 per cent is antisera, which is extracted from blood and used in the treatment of life-threatening conditions. Even more worrying for Australia is that 80 per cent of all antisera exports go to the United States.
Australia had been bracing for a tariff on pharmaceuticals but forecasted it could reach three figures.
It emerged a day later in the Australian Financial Review, Australia's largest pharmaceutical manufacturer CSL had already been lobbying the US for an exemption, and for any tariffs to be phased in over five years.
The company already has a large presence in the US and is looking to expand its investment in the country, something you can be sure CSL will be reminding the Trump administration ahead of any formal imposition of tariffs.
US withdraws, China wants more
If Trump's cabinet is as translucent as a clear window, Xi Jinping's Chinese government offers opacity more akin to a mirror. There's little new in an Australian prime minister having to navigate the high-wire act of your most important trading partner (China) pulling you in one direction, while your most important security partner (the US) pulls you in another direction.
At the same time Trump was further isolating his nation from the global community, China was channelling its inner ABBA, with its ambassador to Australia vocalising his best rendition of "Gimme, Gimme, Gimme".
Marking the 10th anniversary of its free trade deal with Australia, the ambassador wrote in the AFR that his country wanted to expand the existing agreement to include artificial intelligence.
If you needed a reminder that the $20 billion trade war was so 2020, here it was. In 2025, it's all about more, more, more.
There is little wonder why China wants a greater stake in Australia's digital economy. One of its many grievances that led to throwing Australia in the diplomatic freezer was the 2018 decision to exclude Huawei from the 5G rollout, having previously also been blocked from supplying equipment for the NBN.
Speaking ahead of his visit to China this weekend, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese essentially rebuffed that request, instead saying he wanted to focus on the existing deal and the opportunities it offers.
Stabilising relations with China has been a point of pride for the PM. It's why he's able to hold his fourth meeting with Xi Jinping in person early next week.
But tensions still remain. China wants Albanese to loosen foreign investment rules and not proceed with plans to return the Port of Darwin to Australian ownership (neither of which Australia will agree to).
Albanese too will have to raise the plight of writer Yang Hengjun, who is almost 18 months into a two-year reprieve from his death sentence, and Australia's concerns at broader Chinese expansion throughout the Pacific.
Have letter, will travel
The visit to China offered (yet another) reminder of the lack of in-person meeting with Donald Trump. When the PM does make his first visit to DC, he'd do well to take a letter with him.
Trump couldn't hide his enthusiasm when British PM Keir Starmer handed over a letter from King Charles, inviting the president (a fellow lover of monarchies and gold trim) for his second state visit to the UK.
Not to be outdone, Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu this week offered his own version of that's not a letter, this is a letter.
Brandishing a copy of the letter he had sent to the Nobel Prize Committee, Netanyahu praised the president as being worthy of the peace prize (something he's long aspired to, especially since Barack Obama got it).
All eyes will be on what Albanese pulls from his pocket when he eventually sits down with Trump.
Out with MAGA, in with US-style primaries
Voters' repudiation of the Coalition at the May election has seen a noticeable decline in anything that resembled MAGA-style policies (nobody mention DOGE).
Opposition Leader Sussan Ley's push to win back voters the Coalition has lost in recent elections was on show this week when she held meetings with Chinese-Australian leaders and business women in Sydney this week. (A glossy feature in the Women's Weekly also helped scream: PETER DUTTON IS NO LONGER THE LEADER).
Winning back these demographics will be crucial if the Coalition is to find a way back to power. But not all Liberals are completely throwing out ideas from US politics.
Frontbencher Julian Leeser, having been given the fright of his political life in May, is pushing for the adoption of primaries for pre-selections.
The idea would allow non-Liberal members to have a greater say in who represents them, something Leeser argues would not just diversify the candidate ranks but would see the party better reflect the community and lead to policy development that doesn't alienate suburban households that rely on the ability to work-from-home (another war that need not be mentioned again).
University funding at risk if hatred continues
Leeser, who is Jewish, has been one of the most vocal figures in the Coalition demanding the government do more to tackle antisemitism.
Powers to strip funding from public institutions who fail on antisemitism, a review of Australia's hate speech laws, and visa screening for antisemitic views are among the recommendations of a wide-ranging report launched by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese this morning.
Those calls grew louder this week following a door of a Melbourne synagogue being set alight, something that's been broadly condemned across the political landscape.
On Thursday, Albanese vowed the government would do more to tackle antisemitism.
Releasing almost a years' worth of work by the special envoy to combat antisemitism, the government will work with Jillian Segal to withhold funding from universities who fail to reduce hatred against Jewish students.
Segal's plan also calls for the government monitor media organisation's coverage, to screen visa applicants for antisemitic views and review hate speech laws.
"We cannot hope to really abolish antisemitism, but we can push it to the margins," Segal said at a press conference with Albanese and Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke.
A story quickly lost in mushroom frenzy
The coronial inquest into the killing of NT man Kumanjayi Walker would have attracted greater attention this week, had it not been for the global headlines Victoria's mushroom trial was generating.
But it would be remiss to not note that the work of Coroner Elisabeth Armitage, who almost six years after the police shooting of Walker, released an almost 700-page report into the death.
More than half of her 33 recommendations were focused on the NT Police, with the remainder for the NT Government and Health Department.
Federal ministers and authorities insist the criminal justice system is the responsibility of the territory government.
Indigenous Australians Minister Malarndirri McCarthy told the ABC the role she could play was on developing policies around health, education and food security to better improve the lives of First Nations people, in the hope that would prevent people ending up in the criminal justice system in the first place.
Armitage said she couldn't say with certainty that racism led to the death. But she found that racism was widespread within the NT Police force, which she described as "an organisation with hallmarks of institutional racism" and that there was "clear evidence of entrenched, systemic and structural racism within the NT Police".
Australian Federal Police (AFP) Commissioner Reece Kershaw led the NT Police from 2014 until he was appointed to lead the federal police in October 2019, just weeks before Walker's death.
ABC News contacted the AFP to if Commissioner Kershaw had read the findings and if he had any response about the allegations against the police force he once led. An AFP spokesperson said it would be "inappropriate for Commissioner Kershaw to provide commentary on this matter".
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Commissioner Kershaw, whose term was extended last year, retained the "full confidence" of the government.
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