Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is hailing his “frank” phone call with US President Donald Trump as a win, and says despite Mr Trump’s criticism of a much-anticipated refugee deal with Australia he was persuaded into honouring it.
“I always make my case as persuasively as I can. I stand up for Australia. I stand up for our interests,” he told 2SM Radio in Sydney.
“It's obviously a deal he (Trump) wouldn't have done. He's expressed his views about it but he has committed to doing it.
"So, from my point of view acting in Australia's interests, we secured the commitment from the US President that we wanted," he said.
Mr Turnbull's comments came as Australia's ambassador to the US Joe Hockey met with Donald Trump's chief of staff Reince Priebus and top strategist Steve Bannon.
"Mr Priebus and Mr Bannon had a productive meeting with the Australian ambassador at the White House," a White House official said on Thursday.
"They conveyed the president's deep admiration for the Australian people."
The meeting followed a tense call between Malcolm Turnbull and Donald Trump over a refugee resettlement deal that saw relations between to two countries become strained.
The deal was initially struck between Australia and the United States in the final few months of former US President Barack Obama’s time in the White House.
The US agreed to resettle refugees who are currently in held in Australian immigration detention on Manus Island in PNG and Nauru.
But in recent days Donald Trump has thrown doubt over its future over social media, including a tweet in which he described it as a ‘dumb deal’.
Mr Trump has since moved to clarify his comments and more recently said he loves Australia.
"If a previous administration does something you have to respect that but you can also say, 'Why are we doing this?'” he told reporters in Washington.
He said he would honour the deal but only refugees who passed extreme vetting would be allowed into the US.
Mr Turnbull said he was disappointed information about his phone call with President Trump had been leaked from the White House.
“It's really important for me to be disciplined and circumspect about what goes on between me and the President of the United States," Mr Turnbull said.
"If people in America want to leak or make claims about what was in a conversation, that's disappointing but I'm not going to do that.”
The Prime Minister has described a 25-minute phone call with President Trump over the weekend as "very frank" and "forthright" but denies reports that the US President hung up on him.
“He's been very critical of the deal that President Obama did and he clearly wouldn't have done it himself but we have persuaded him to stick with it nonetheless and that was the outcome I wanted,” Mr Turnbull said.
Opposition Leader Bill Shorten offered his support for the Prime Minister, saying that an American-Australian alliance cannot be conducted over Twitter.
“If the media reports are right, I think Mr Trump needs to show more respect to Mr Turnbull and Australia,” he told reporters in Perth.
Former Foreign Minister Bob Carr has described President Trump’s behaviour as a rude dismissal.
“It has been rude treatment of an Australian leader, unprecedented in the contact between American and Australian leadership,” he told the ABC’s '7.30' program on Thursday.
Greens Leader Richard Di Natale said the US alliance had become a dangerous liability for Australia and should be scrapped now that Donald Trump is president.
“This man is an unhinged, dangerous lunatic and now is not the time for appeasement. It is the time to take a stand, to show some leadership and to resist. We need to recognise here that the Australia-US alliance, which has served us well in the past, has become a dangerous liability,” he told reporters in Melbourne.
He said the uncertainty over whether the US would honour the deal has resulted in extreme trauma for thousands of people currently in offshore detention on Manus Island and Nauru.
However Senior Adviser on Asia-Pacific Security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Andrew Shearer, said it was important to keep the spat in perspective because allies do have disagreements and Australia must consider the dynamic of the relationship in the long term.
"There are rising threats in our region whether from North Korea with its nuclear weapons and missiles program, from China's more assertive activities in the South China Sea and East China Sea and ISIL and its affiliates in South east Asia," he said.
"So there are a massive number of threats there and Australia can't deal with these threats and challenges on our own, so we need the alliance."
Mr Shearer added that America's allies may feel the strain for some time to come under President Trump.
"He (Trump) tends to see issues a bit like a property developer. He tends to see issues as winner or loser takes all ... I think he brings that approach from the business world into international politics now. That's a really challenging proposition for America's allies."
"Prime Minister Turnbull is in a difficult position. He needs this refugee deal because it's very important for the Coalition government's strong border protection policies.
"He's being attacked at the same time by Bill Shorten for not standing up to Trump more forcefully."
-With AAP
