Photo: Lia Toby/Getty Images
Sometimes, when you’re the prime minister of a country, you need to keep the padam padam of your heart to yourself. Australian PM Anthony Albanese apologized today for inappropriately joking about national treasure Kylie Minogue. “I apologise unequivocally for the comments,” he said in a statement to CNN.
Albanese made the joke on Nikki Osborne’s podcast Bush Deep in an episode that came out Thursday. During Osborne’s rapid-fire question segment, she asked him, “Shag, marry, date: Kylie Minogue, Nicole Kidman, or Rhonda Burchmore?” “I just got married — I’m only six months in,” Albanese protested. But Osbourne responded, “But if it goes tits up, let’s just pretend.” And Albanese immediately relented. “Oh, Kylie, clearly,” he said. “You’d marry Kylie and shag her and date her?” Osborne clarified. “All of the above,” he said. “She’s terrific.”
Following the podcast, some Australians were offended. Senator Sarah Henderson, of the opposition Liberal Party, posted on X about him. “Anthony Albanese’s whisky-fuelled comments on the ‘Deep Bush’ podcast are disrespectful to women, embarrassing to Australians and demean the office of Prime Minister,” she wrote. “Comedian Nikki Osborne is very good at her craft and cleverly skewered the Prime Minister throughout her interview. Rather than politely decline to engage, Mr Albanese got into the gutter with his grubby remarks which show extremely poor judgement at a time when trust in Labor is collapsing.”
Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles promised ABC that their administration is “utterly committed” to elevating women in society. “From time to time, we obviously do different interviews to the one we are doing now, but I think the other point to make here is that the government that the PM leads is the first in history that has had equality in terms of the number of men and women in Cabinet,” he added. Okay, but how will they make this up to Minogue? Maybe the Cabinet should just officially make “The Loco-Motion” the national anthem moving forward.
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