True to form, Paul Keating used his 80th birthday interview with The Australian Financial Review to throw down the gauntlet to his fellow Australians and their political leaders on the nation’s unambitious low-growth complacency, it’s “confiscatory” taxes on wealth creators, its abandoned discipline on government spending and its failure to use the price mechanism to reduce carbon emissions at least cost.

He laments the lack of a proper settlement with Australia’s original inhabitants and “for God’s sake” its ongoing constitutional reliance on the British monarch as head of state. And, even more sharply, he attacks the bipartisan AUKUS nuclear submarine pact with Washington and London at the core of Australia’s strategic security against a rising China.