The former Australian prime minister Paul Keating has denounced the US- and UK-backed plan for nuclear-powered submarines as “like throwing a handful of toothpicks at the mountain”, declaring Australia should avoid being drawn into a war with China.
The former Labor leader on Wednesday accused the major Australian political parties of losing their way on foreign policy, while dismissing the credibility of the UK’s “tilt” to the Indo-Pacific region.
“Britain is like an old theme park sliding into the Atlantic compared to modern China,” said Keating, who was Australia’s prime minister from 1991 to 1996."
Keating also played down criticism of China’s militarisation of disputed features in the South China Sea by saying “big powers are rude”, and said it would be wrong to insist the increasingly dominant economic power could be only “a stakeholder” in a US-led system.
While he said Beijing was “in the adolescent phase of their diplomacy” and had “testosterone running everywhere”, Australia had no alternative but to engage with an increasingly powerful China.
Keating said Australia “should not be drawn into a military engagement over Taiwan, US sponsored or otherwise” because Taiwan was “not a vital Australian interest”.
Keating argued the foreign policy debate in Australia was now driven by “the spooks” in the security agencies, and when it came to the major foreign policy choices the Coalition and Labor were “fundamentally not up to it”.
He said the party he once led should not have been so quick to support the government’s submarine decision; it should have used the cover of the agreed 18-month study period to consider the right choice for Australia.
“Instead of that, Labor gets a briefing one night, and by 11 o’clock the next morning, they’re in the car,” he said.
He said Labor’s foreign affairs spokesperson, Penny Wong, had opted for a “reasonably quiet political life” by effectively taking the position that “there shouldn’t be an ounce of daylight between her and the Liberal party” on foreign policy.
“You have no big disputes, because you’re glued up on to the government, but you make no national progress,” he said.
