Australian media ‘up to its ears in fanning China fears’, says Paul Keating

Australia’s media was ‘up to its ears’ in fanning fears about China’s rise, Paul Keating said.

Paul Keating at The Australian’s Strategic Forum on Monday. Picture: Nikki Short

Australia’s media was “up to its ears” in fanning fears about China’s rise and had failed in its duty to the public to present a balanced picture of China’s rise, Paul Keating said.

The former Labor prime minister said leaks to news­papers from national security agencies were being passed off as the “evil bearings of the Chinese state and should have no role in ­influencing foreign policy”.

“It is the national interest and its long-run trajectory which should guide our hand and not the nominally pious belchings of ‘do-gooder’ journalists who themselves live on leaks of agencies unfit to divine a national pathway,” he said.

Mr Keating singled out the The Sydney Morning Herald, which carried two anti-China stories in Monday’s paper, for “the usual ‘shock and awe’ indignation”.

Reports a few months earlier in the same paper and its sister publication, The Age, headlined “China Threat” had “turned out to be a beat-up” about China supposedly building a naval base on Vanuatu. “There’s alarm in Australia at the scale and speed of China’s rise and this comes out particularly in the hysteria in the media, especially The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, but run up often clearly in the rear by The Australian,” he said.

The comments came at the Strategic Forum hosted by The Australian with support from the Judith Neilson Institute.

Mr Keating said the “subtleties of foreign policy and the elasticity of diplomacy are being supplanted by the phobias of a group of nat­ional security agencies which are now effectively running the foreign policy of the country. And the media has been up to its ears in it”.

Drops to journalists by sec­urity agencies about a “seditious” publication at a particular university or the “hijinks of another Chinese entrepreneur” were passed off as the “evil bearing of the Chinese state”.

Mr Keating said Australian media had been “recreant” — unfaithful — in its duty to the public in “failing to present a balanced picture of the rise, legitimacy and importance of China, preferring instead to traffic in side-plays dressed up with cosmetics of ­sedition and risk”.