Paul Keating trashes Quad ‘nonsense’ and pleads: get us out of AUKUS

Paul Keating says the US is ‘exceptionally ungrateful’ to allies like Australia who have long been loyal, urging Canberra to ‘walk away’ from the AUKUS security agreement.

Paul Keating says ‘we shouldn’t be stringing together the US, Japan, India and Australia to try to contain China’. Picture: La Trobe

Former prime minister Paul Keating says the US is “exceptionally ungrateful” to allies like Australia who have long been loyal, urging Canberra to “walk away” from the AUKUS security agreement scheduled to deliver the nation a nuclear submarine capability.

In a wide-ranging speech at La Trobe University on Wednesday night, Mr Keating said it was “not intelligent” for Australia to be “owned” by the US and trashed the Quadrilateral security dialogue between the US, Japan, India and Australia, as well as the G7 grouping for failing to include Beijing.

“The Quad is a piece of strategic nonsense,” he said. “We shouldn’t be stringing together the US, Japan, India and Australia to try to contain China.”

The Labor elder statesmen, whose leadership as prime minister and treasurer has been cited by Anthony Albanese as a major inspiration for his own government, said the US had not been “grateful” enough for Australia’s contributions to global affairs, including the creation of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation group – one of Mr Keating’s key legacies.

“This (APEC) came out of the Australian foreign policy – this is my personal gift to the United States. They will give you no thanks and gratitude,” Mr ­Keating said.

“The US is exceptionally ­ungrateful for people who have (supported it) for a lifetime. I am one of them. For two decades within the Labor Party … I supported the United States against what was then the pro-communist left.”

(L-R) Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, US President Joe Biden, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Tokyo in May.

Mr Keating, who has continued to speak out on national ­security and economic issues, ­attended the Labor campaign launch this year where he sat with Mr Albanese alongside former prime minister Kevin Rudd.

Mr Albanese has previously been forced to distance himself from the views of Mr Keating on China and the AUKUS security agreement, but said he would ­always listen to the former leader.

“I seek Paul Keating’s counsel regularly, and he’s always worth listening to, but the fact is that we’ve had an alliance with the United States since 1951,” Mr ­Albanese said in September last year.

While having previously criticised AUKUS as futile, likening it to “throwing toothpicks at a mountain”, Mr Keating on Wednesday said “it would be a ­tragedy for Australia” if Labor followed through with the deal.

He took a veiled swipe at his party for failing to listen to his warnings when it backed in AUKUS about 24 hours after Scott Morrison signed the agreement in September last year.

“The Labor Party in opposition should have said … we’ll think about it. Instead they went for it,” he said. “That morning I heard about it early and I put a statement out saying I was opposed to it, that I thought it would subjugate our sovereignty.

“The Labor Party could have taken notice of me of me on this point. They took no notice, I had no conversation with anybody and, of course, they signed up.”

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton claimed earlier this year that Labor was “laying the ground” to dump AUKUS given concerns from some within the party about the “capability gap” the project left between now and when the new nuclear submarines were due to hit the water in the 2040s.

Mr Keating said if he were prime minister, he would “say no” to joining a war launched by the US should China move to seize Taiwan. “Taiwan, I repeat, is not of vital Australian interest,” he said. “If I’ve got any advice for them (the US) it’s to stick to strategic ambiguity like glue.

“The chances of the Americans having a victory of Taiwan is nil, in my opinion, and why would we want to be part of that defeat?”

An artist’s impression of the Royal Australian Navy’s Future submarine.

The comments follow Mr Keating’s fiery rebuke of US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for visiting Taiwan earlier this year, which he said was “unprecedented, foolish, dangerous and unnecessary”.

Ms Pelosi’s visit came after months of military incursions by Beijing into Taiwanese airspace.

Mr Keating said there would never be “an operative, peaceful world” with the current G7 structure, a group of the seven most advanced countries – excluding China – which he said was “the stabilising power in Asia”.

“The US could run the world co-operatively with China. In other words, the US consolidates the Atlantic, which includes bringing Russia into Europe, and in the east, the stability is provided by the Chinese,” he said.

“And that model would be, I think, advantageous for the whole world, because the Chinese are not trying to overturn the existing system. Let’s get this clear: China is not the old Soviet Union. It’s not exporting ideology.”

Since winning government in May, Labor has begun repairing the Chinese relationship, with ministers from both countries meeting on the sidelines of multilateral forums.