Paul Keating slams Marles’ ‘careless betrayal’ of Australian independence

Paul Keating has slammed Defence Minister Richard Marles for saying Australia would play a key role in a potential US-China war in the Pacific.

Paul Keating has accused the Defence Minister of ‘betraying’ the country’s policy agency.

You can now listen to The Australian's articles. Give us your feedback.

You can now listen to The Australian's articles.

Labor luminary Paul Keating has slammed Defence Minister Richard Marles for saying Australia would play a key role in a potential US-China war in the Pacific, accusing him of a “careless betrayal of the country’s policy agency” that will “go down as a dark ­moment in Australia’s history”.

The former prime minister took aim at a sweep of recent political leaders including Julia Gillard, Stephen Smith, Tony Abbott, Julie Bishop and Mr Marles, and said the US had found among such politicians a “mug who will buy its venal view of affairs”.

Mr Keating claimed China had “no intention” of threatening Australia nor the US and that the assertion was only being pushed because of relative US decline.

Mr Marles earlier in the week told The Australian’s Defending Australia summit that Australia would play a key role in a potential great power war in the Pacific.

“Our continent is more relevant to great power contest now than it’s ever been before,” he said.

“That is as much of a question in the here and now as is the building up of our defence capability.”

Mr Keating characterised it as “a moment when an Australian Labor government intellectually ceded Australia to the United States as a platform for the US and by implication … for military engagement against the Chinese state in response to a threat China is alleged to be making”.

He said the government was “devoid of an electoral authority” to make such decisions and Mr Marles’ position revealed the government’s “fatalist thinking”.

Mr Keating took issue with the assertion China was a military threat to Australia and the US, and said the US merely saw as an “affront” China’s relative ascension and US decline.

“China’s singular crime is to have built an economy larger than the United States, with industrial breadth and depth that the United States not only does not possess but cannot hope to emulate,” Mr Keating said.

“This is the affront which the United States cannot bear, because nowhere in the US playbook is there a chapter arti­culating the precipitous decline in US industrial strength or in US strategic primacy.

“Hence, now, the US is running about trying to sweep gullible allies into its declining and failing pitch. Yet, it believes there is always a mug who will buy its venal view of affairs. And in Australia, the United States is not disappointed.”

Mr Keating claimed the rank-and-file members of the Labor Party would largely not support “Australia being dragged into a war with and by the United States over Taiwan”.

Mr Keating took aim at the initial decision to host US military assets in Australia.

“This began with Julia Gillard and Stephen Smith agreeing to base rotational US troops in Darwin during Barack Obama’s ‘pivot’ moment in … 2011,” Mr Keating said.

“This inauspicious action was locked down further by Julie Bishop and Tony Abbott with the Force Posture Agreement of 2014 providing US access to Australian military facilities as well as agreement as to the types of activities US forces may conduct on and from Australian soil.

“Yet built upon this agreement is the whole AUKUS fantasy, designed to lock Australia further into US naval operations.”

He said Mr Marles’ latest contribution “amounts to nothing more than a careless betrayal of the country’s policy agency and independence in its ability to make decisions in its own national interest”.