An overseas trip a month, the latest undertaken during a domestic political crisis – our Prime Minister has truly earned the nickname, ‘Airbus Albo’. He just can’t get enough of the photo ops, including even taking selfies with the Ruddster.

He must actually believe we are impressed by images of him wiggling his arse while wearing a very unflattering version of an Hawaiian shirt. At least, he wasn’t donning some sort of preposterous local headwear. But let’s face it, the welfare of those living on the Cook Islands, or Tuvalu for that matter, is not high on our list of priorities, at least for most of us.

Unsurprisingly, the progressive press has become outraged by the suggestion that Albo has been spending too much time hightailing it to international confabs. It’s no more than other prime ministers have done.

Don’t we realise how important these face-to-face meetings are? Where would the world be without those (pre-written) wordy, meaningless communiques released after most meetings? (They are really only one step removed from the answers given by Miss World contestants – you know the ones, when she claims to be only interested in promoting world peace.)

A good example of this defence of Airbus Albo came from ex-BBC stringer and now Sydney resident, Nick Bryant. He writes regularly in the Sydney Morning Herald. ‘One of the unexpected hallmarks of his tenure has been his confidence on the world stage, which goes some way towards explaining the Liberal taunt, “Airbus Albo”. It doubles as a back-handed compliment. They are seeking to turn a national asset into a political liability.’

He goes on to defend Albanese by declaring that only seventh-graders can’t see the national benefits of all this gallivanting. ‘Grown-up bipartisanship in foreign affairs is being replaced by sophomoric name calling.’ What we have to understand is that ‘proximity rather than remoteness is now the defining feature of Australian foreign policy. For the country’s prime minister and diplomatic corps, that will necessitate a lot more long-haul travel’.

OK, that’s one opinion. But here’s the thing: a lot of these international shindigs are unnecessary. They have become like boiling water added to bicarb soda. They often start off small and don’t always involve the heads of government. The G20 is a case in point.  But it’s not long before they expand, often with a self-serving secretariat in the background.

In the end, their only purpose is to create photo opportunities as well as the impression of faux camaraderie. All that talk about the importance of side meetings is generally spin put out by the political operatives and diplomats who also attend these meetings. (Just think of the frequent flyer points, even if the meeting is a bust.)

One could also take the view of ‘so what’   – our head of government is always jetting off overseas, does it really matter? The thing to note is that far too often our Prime Minister travels bearing gifts, gifts that are not always well-crafted to serve the national interest. They are the equivalent of blankets, flour and glass beads.

Take Airbus’s recent trip to the Pacific Leaders’ Forum. He managed to commit $2 billion of our money to the UN’s boondoggle climate fund. In addition, he pledged a further $350 million to climate measures for the Pacific Islands. Who knows what this money will really be used for? There is some chat about the security benefits of the relationship and fending off the influence of China, but there is no hard analysis.

Albo also managed to hand over 280 annual visas for those living in Tuvalu to migrate to Australia because they are preordained as climate refugees. This is notwithstanding the fact that it is agreed that Tuvalu is not sinking into the sea and its useful landmass has actually expanded by over 2 per cent in the past several decades.

But what the heck – it played well with the Guardian crowd. And what’s good for Tuvalu should be good for plenty of other Pacific islands.

As for Airbus’s jaunt to catch up with President Xi, it was portrayed as path-breaking by many journalists who had previously invested heavily in the benefits of the China-Australia relationship.

The fact is the trade sanctions/tariffs that China has imposed on Australia in recent times – think here coal, barley, wine, lobster – were proscribed by the free trade agreement between the two countries finalised under the Abbott Coalition government. (Sure, free should be ‘free’.)

But it’s OK, Albo masterly negotiated a deal whereby China could keep its 99-year lease of the Port of Darwin while releasing an Australian citizen who should never have been locked up in China in the first place. That’s action for you. (By the way, who does a 99-year lease? Which nutjob was in charge of that snafu?)

Leaving aside the wasteful doling out of gifts, do these overseas conferences, get-togethers, jamborees really matter? Sadly, I think they do, for all the wrong reasons.  The organisers often realise the power they can potentially bring to bear on world leaders to submit to their preferred global agendas lest there is domestic political blowback for them.

The clearest example is the UN’s annual COP climate conferences. This year’s is coming up in the United Arab Emirates. It will be COP28.

But take your mind back to COP26, held in Glasgow in late 2021. Boris was still the UK prime minister and top (or bottom, depending on your vantage point) of his game. He was energetically assisted by the appalling Alok Sharma, a Tory politician and COP26 minister.

The true believer, Boris, wanted the UK to be regarded as a world leader on climate change, even though the UK’s emissions are even lower than Australia’s. In order to do this, he wanted to rope in as many other countries as possible into his vision of global action even though he didn’t even bother to try to convince China and Russia. Australia was caught in the crossfires.

It’s a plausible hypothesis that the Coalition would never have signed on to net zero had it not been for COP 26. Remember all that to-ing and fro-ing about whether or not ScoMo would attend the actual event, even though we were sending other ministers and a phalanx of bureaucrats? In the end, he did go.

It was a time of peak climate hysteria pushed by Boris and Sharma. ScoMo thought the clever trick of committing Australia to net zero would really impress the COP crowd. It might just win him the election. (Pause for laughter here.) Those Liberal parliamentarians who were to lose their seats to the Teals were fully on board.

The message here is beware of international outings. The embarrassing photos may conceal a great deal of domestic damage without the public even realising.