Early this year the Ideas and Society Program at La Trobe University that I have convened for the past thirteen years invited Paul Keating to speak to our online audience on Australia and China. We invited Professor James Curran, a Professor of Modern History at the University of Sydney, to act as interlocutor. We decided to hold the event after the federal election. Nothing was more certain than that Keating would speak outside the bipartisan consensus on Australia’s relations with China and that the tired and threadbare Morrison Government would seek to wedge Labor by claiming, preposterously, that Keating represented the ‘real’ opinions of Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong.
The event took place on October 12. There were 4,000 registrations. As readers will be able to see from the edited version appearing in The Conversation, the result was a true bravura Keating performance, of wisdom, breadth and humour. What Keating had to say on many subjects was both thought-provoking and original.
Like Malcolm Fraser in his later years, Keating believes Australia needs to rethink thoroughly its relations with the United States that presently threaten to draw us into a hopeless American military conflict with China, most likely over Taiwan, that there is zero prospect of winning.
He believes that the China threat rests largely on a mistaken analogy between China and the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union never outlived its revolutionary origin, hoping to provide the world with a model superior to capitalism. China has no such revolutionary ambition. As the largest economy in the world already, and one certain to outstrip even further its only rival, the United States, what China wants is genuine equality with the United States, accepting US leadership in the Atlantic in return for its own leadership in the Pacific, with India asserting its own position in the Indian Ocean.
The key China problem, as Keating argued, was whether Washington would be able to accept the rise of China and find a means of integrating it into the international system. As he pointed out, the failure of the Great Powers–France, Russia and the United Kingdom–to deal with the emergence of Imperial Germany in 1871 had tragic consequences: two World Wars.
Keating also spoke very powerfully of more local Australian issues: the abject failure of recent submarine acquisition policy, that will leave us with a small fleet suitable for war with China and reliant permanently on US expertise but not fit for the purpose of defending the Australian coastline, the kind of submarine fleet he would have sought to continue building if he had won the 1996 election. He argued the so-called ‘QUAD’ was exactly the kind of containment arrangement that the world did not need.
He believed that the reign of King Charles the Third as Australia’s head of state was an absurdity that would continue to puzzle our neighbours in the region where we had to live. He regarded the British component of AUKUS as risible, with the defence of Australia supposedly beginning at Cornwall.
We ought to have learnt our lesson with the fall of Singapore. Keating bemoaned the collapse of the mutual defence treaty he had negotiated with Indonesia. And he spoke with pride over his role in finding legislation over indigenous native title and his offering an example of truth-telling in the speech he delivered at Redfern Park.
And much more.
View the conversation with Paul Keating here.
Robert Manne is Emeritus Professor, Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow and Convenor of the Ideas and Society Program at La Trobe University
