By any reasonable measure, the numbers are absurd. ‘s so-called First Nations Ambassador, Justin Mohamed, has seemingly managed to spend more time airborne than in any substantive engagement likely to improve the lives of Indigenous ns.
In just two years, Mohamed has clocked up 261 travel days (an entire working year) at a cost of more than $730,000 to taxpayers. Add to that a contract worth just shy of $1million over two and a half years, and the obvious question arises: what exactly has he achieved?
This isn’t some isolated administrative extravagance, by the way. It’s emblematic of the broader drift and performative politics that characterise the Albanese government. And they claim they want to cut spending and fix the budget!
We’ve seen this movie before. Airbus Albo, as the Opposition dubbed him, doesn’t mind taxpayer-funded travel perks, not least his well-documented preference for Qantas upgrades and photo ops abroad. So it’s hardly surprising that a pet foreign policy project dressed up as First Nations engagement would follow the same globe-trotting script.
But here’s the problem: while Mohamed racks up hotel points and business-class miles to destinations like New York, Geneva, Paris, Dubai and Hawaii, the supposed mission to ‘implement a First Nations approach to foreign policy’ remains nebulous at best.
Even within DFAT, the exact objectives and outcomes of the role appear to shift depending on the press release spinning a defence. First it was about supporting the Voice, until the Voice referendum failed. Then it was about regional engagement and economic diplomacy. Now, it’s part of some vague effort to counter China’s influence in the Pacific.
If it all sounds like policy on the run, that’s because it is. And you’re paying for it.
Of his 46 taxpayer-funded trips, just five were to Pacific Islands. In contrast, Mohamed spent more than twice as long in the United States alone. That’s not regional engagement, it’s tourism with talking points.
When Daily Mail previously revealed that a single two-week trip to Kansas City and Washington DC cost taxpayers over $75,000, it raised eyebrows. But even that wasn’t the whole picture. FOI documents showed his team has burned through nearly $400,000 on travel, separate from his own expenses. And yet there’s still no public explanation (let alone evidence) of what measurable benefit this travelling roadshow has delivered for the Indigenous communities the ambassador is supposed to represent.
This matters not just because the waste is galling, but because this kind of performative diplomacy erodes public confidence in the very causes it purports to champion.
If you wanted to design a role that fuels scepticism about reconciliation, appoint a taxpayer-funded roving ambassador to attend international conferences with no clear mandate, no KPIs and no link to tangible outcomes for those suffering entrenched disadvantage back home.
If this were a corporate role, it would be axed in the next round of budget cuts. Instead, it’s being defended by the government with the often hollow rhetoric of diversity, inclusion and soft power, as though those buzzwords justify burning through public funds with no accountability.
The truth is you can’t close the gap from business class, and symbolic diplomacy, no matter how well-intentioned or well-funded doesn’t help when it’s divorced from practical policy.
If the Albanese government can’t see that this is wrong, they’re not listening. And if the Coalition has any sense, they’ll stick to their pre-election pledge to abolish this role on day one of returning to office. But God only knows how far off into the distance that day might be.
The real work of reconciliation will remain stuck on the tarmac until this bloke gets the boot.