Ex-PM Paul Keating says Australia’s ‘big picture’ vision has become small

Paul Keating has lashed ‘pass-through prime minister’ Scott Morrison and Labor’s Anthony Albanese, declaring Australia has ‘lost its way’.

Former prime minister Paul Keating has lashed Scott Morrison, Bill Shorten and Anthony Albanese. Picture: Darren England

Paul Keating has savaged Scott Morrison as “a pass-through prime minister” who wilfully has surrendered Australia’s sovereignty to the US under the AUKUS agreement, lashed Anthony Albanese for his complicity and declared the country has “lost its way”.

In an exclusive interview to mark 30 years since he became prime minister, Mr Keating said Australia suffered from a lack of leadership, imagination and a radical conception of policy as both major parties viewed politics as “a game within a bubble”.

Mr Keating, who was sworn in as prime minister on December 20, 1991, also took a swipe at former leader Bill Shorten for turning Labor back to a “redistributive” model and said Mr Albanese was “moving towards the Hawke-Keating model”, but he stopped short of saying it had fully returned.

The Weekend Australian can reveal that Labor has not invited Mr Keating to mark the 30th anniversary of his prime ministership – nor the 20th anniversary in 2011 – with a gala dinner as it did for Bob Hawke and Gough Whitlam.

Mr Keating, who met presidents Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush and Bill Clinton when in office, said he supported and encouraged US engagement in the Asia-Pacific but only as “a conciliating and balancing power”.

“American policy has been, since the war, about maintaining strategic hegemony across the world, including in Asia,” he said. “I don’t believe that the US is able to maintain strategic hegemony in Asia with the rise of China.

“So, I’ve taken the view, as far back as 20 years ago, that the US should be the framer and guarantor of the Atlantic but not of the Pacific. In Asia, it should be the conciliating and balancing power. And we need it to be.

“To try and argue that now, as China returns to where it was over 200 years ago as the major state by population and by GDP, that it will be a strategic client of the US in the way Japan has for 80 years, is strategic nonsense.”

Scott Morrison has been labelled a ‘pass through’ prime minister by predecessor Paul Keating. Picture: NCA Newswire / Gaye Gerard

Mr Keating opposed the AUKUS deal with the US and Britain under which Australia would acquire nuclear-powered submarines. As Australia had no nuclear power industry, this would require the use of US technology, industry and personnel, for building, operation and maintenance.

“The US has had little regard or respect for Australia’s right to its own sovereignty,” he said. “What the US has connived in is the effective expropriation of Australia’s strategic sovereignty through the AUKUS program. It has fundamentally taken from Australia our strategic sovereignty because the submarines will simply be a unit of any US naval force.

“Scott Morrison, a pass-through prime minister of no policy account, wilfully and secretly alienated the sovereignty of his own country to that of another state, the US, a country his limited strategic vision cannot see beyond.

“His secret negotiation delivered to the US military effective strategic control of Australian naval forces, the sovereign policy options of the Australian nation.

“We are a frightened country. We continue running to a strategic guarantor – it used to be the UK and now it is the US. The fact that this has happened is a terrible indictment upon us and, of course, broadly they have had the complicity of the Labor Party.”

While Mr Keating and Mr Hawke endorsed Labor at the 2019 election, essentially for being the inheritor of their economic reforms, Mr Keating said Labor must not revert to a pre-1980s policy mindset. “Philosophically, Labor is moving towards the Hawke-Keating model,” he said.

“Anthony Albanese’s views about aspiration record a shift in sentiment inside Labor, whereas the Bill Shorten model was essentially redistributive, taking economic resources from higher-income groups and distributing them to lower-income groups.

“Bob and I wanted to make the place wealthier, richer, and do things to improve the creation and distribution of wealth, and at least provide a level playing field for everybody.

“We always had the sunny uplands in the policy. The sunny uplands, the notion where everybody found a place, disappeared at the last election and is reappearing somewhat now.”

In the wide-ranging interview featured in Inquirer, Mr Keating reflected on his prime ministership and contemporary policy issues, and said his “big picture” approach to politics was as relevant now as it was 30 years ago.

“The big picture is shorthand for talking about the large geo-strategic and geo-economic forces,” he said. “Those forces are now virulent and therefore command the thinking of a national government about how one pilots a society through and in the face of those forces. The big picture does change nations but there are relatively few artisans in the craft of nation building.”

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