Paul Keating has trashed his reputation with one wild speech

In suggesting the US is the aggressor, that AUKUS is dangerous, and most appallingly that Australia’s human rights problems are as bad as China’s with the Uighurs, the ex-PM looks like a fool, writes James Morrow.

To listen to Paul Keating tell it, it is a shame that Australia didn’t take up the chance to join Imperial Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere when it had the chance.

Alright, that is an exaggeration. But only a slight one.

Because to listen to the former PM at the National Press Club Wednesday, just about anything would be better for Australia than to be tied up in a military alliance with the United States which, to hear Keating tell it, was the real villain in the Pacific.

At times he sounded less like a distinguished former statesman who floated the dollar and more like an undergraduate conspiracy theorist who thinks the China “threat” (his scare-quotes) is just a fiction manufactured by the Pentagon and Congress to sell arms.

AUKUS he called “the worst international decision” by a Labor government since Billy Hughes’s push to introduce conscription in World War I.

Former Prime Minister of Australia Paul Keating addresses the National Press Club. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

In Keating World, the US is the aggressor, the UK “our former colonial masters,” and China just a plucky little country trying to stand on its own two feet.

Taiwan, meanwhile, was described as a “so-called democracy” (74.9 per cent turnout in the last presidential election, but who’s counting?) and its defenders nothing but servants of “imperialism” who will drag Australia into World War III.

Paul Keating has slammed Labor’s push to sign up to AUKUS. (Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

So far, so snoozy.

But it was his airy dismissal of the plight of China’s Muslim Uighur minority that was the most disturbing.

Keating attacked a journalist who had recently co-authored a series on the strategic threat posed by China (“you ought to do the right thing and drum yourself out of Australian journalism,” Keating blustered) and who had the temerity to ask about Beijing’s documented abuses of the group.

“I’m not going to defend China about the Uighurs, there’s disputes about what the nature of the Chinese affront to the Uighurs are,” Keating claimed, ignoring shocking and credible reports from the UN and elsewhere about slave labour, internment camps, forced sterilisation, and cultural genocide.

This photo taken on June 4, 2019 shows a facility believed to be a re-education camp where mostly Muslim ethnic minorities are detained, north of Akto in China's northwestern Xinjiang region. (Photo by GREG BAKER / AFP)

Then, he pivoted: “What if the Chinese said – what about deaths in custody of Aboriginal people in your prison system? Wouldn’t that be a valid point for them? Wouldn’t it be a valid point?”

Right, as if China were right now having a debate about offering its Uighur minority a “voice to the politburo”.

Or, you know, the Chinese press were allowed to report sympathetically about what is happening in ethnic minority communities – as they do in Australia – and demand the government do better.

This false moral equivalence is bizarre and, frankly, disgraceful.

One wonders if Keating is now even proud of having been PM, given that he apparently sees the country he led as being morally on par – if not beneath – Xi Jinping’s authoritarian regime.

Keating has for years now taken this line that China is no threat, that Western powers led by the US are the true aggressors, and that Australia will be better off if we don’t tie up with other nations lest we get drawn into some future conflict.

For a man who once insulted his opposite number in parliament calling him a “shiver looking for a spine to run up,” it’s all quite the fall from grace.

In his apparent terror of seeing his nation take sides, Keating himself has become the shiver.

Originally published as Paul Keating has trashed his reputation with one wild speech