Former prime minister and treasurer Paul Keating has used his 80th birthday to urge Australians and their political leaders to break out of a “timidity” in the nation’s intellectual structure, its economic and business aspirations, its constitutional links with Britain, its security dependence on the United States and its failure to reconcile with its original inhabitants.

“The country is so timid,” Keating tells The Australian Financial Review. “To come of age, Australia has to have a new and altogether different idea of itself.