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Former Australian prime minister Paul Keating attacks senior members of Albanese government over AUKUS agreement and foreign policy

Paul Johnson - 9 August 2024

Former Australian prime minister Paul Keating has taken aim at Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Defence Minister Richard Marles, accusing them of abandoning traditional party values.

Speaking to 7.30 in an interview about the AUKUS agreement, Mr Keating accused the government of being a "sellout" on its defence policy, while defending Chinese interests in Taiwan.

"In defence and foreign policy, this is not a Labor government," Mr Keating said.

"This is a party which has adopted the defence and foreign policies of the Morrison Liberal government.

"This is a sellout."

The former Labor leader had been asked about the AUKUS agreement between the US, UK and Australia, which he has been a constant critic of since its announcement.

Mr Keating then called it "the worst deal in all history".

Mr Marles is in the US and has agreed to allow the transfer of US and UK naval nuclear material to Australia.

The partnership also provides for more rotations of US troops to the region, which Mr Keating criticised.

"What he said made me cringe … it will make any Labor person cringe," Mr Keating said.

"There'll be American force posture now in Australia, involving every domain.

"This government has sold out to the United States.

"They've fallen for the dinner on the White House lawn.

"The prime minister gets the dinners on the White House lawn … [and] these turkeys all fall for it."

Is China or the US aggressive?

Defence Minister Marles has been vocal about the need for the partnership and being allied with the United States in the face of an increasingly aggressive China.

China has been involved in several incidents with regional neighbours in the South China Sea and the defence minister himself was, in June, confronted by Chinese PLA officers in Singapore.

Mr Keating says the AUKUS agreement and Australia's longstanding alliance with the United States, which he called an "aggressive ally", is what may make Australia a target for any incident with China.

"We are better left alone than we are being protected by an aggressive power like the United States," Mr Keating told 7.30.

Asked why he considered the US to be aggressive, Mr Keating said it was because "it's trying to superintend from the Atlantic, the largest Asian power, which is China".

'Chinese real estate'

One of the major global flashpoints with China is the future of Taiwan.

The island remains self-governed but China looms large, having recently held War Games in the Taiwan Strait, where it regularly flies military sorties.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has routinely said he would not hesitate to use "force" to claim Taiwan.

Mr Keating labelled the island "Chinese real estate" on 7.30, when talking about Australia's defence pact with the US.

"What this is all about is the Chinese laying claim to Taiwan, and the Americans are going to say 'no, no, we're going to keep these Taiwanese people protected', even though they're sitting on Chinese real estate," he said.

Asked about the wishes of the Taiwanese people, and China's threat to dismantle civil society in the country, Mr Keating told 7.30 Taiwan was not a vital Australian interest.

Should conflict arise between the US and China over Taiwan, Mr Keating said Australia would be the nation that would ultimately lose out.

"The Chinese will fight to the last teenage soldier to defend Taiwan and the Chinese state, and the Americans will not take on such a fight and more than that, will not win it.

"[Then] all of a sudden the Americans take off and leave and we're the ones who have done all the offence."

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-08/paul-keating-aukus-china-albanese-foreign-policy/104201388

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2H8_vQkKkgA

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Aukus pact will turn Australia into ‘51st state’ of the US, Paul Keating says

Former prime minister argues Australia has made itself a target by aligning with American ‘aggression’ towards China

Martin Farrer and Daniel Hurst - 9 Aug 2024

Australia’s participation in the Aukus defence pact risks handing military control of the country to Washington and becoming the “51st state of the United States”, according to former prime minister Paul Keating.

Speaking on ABC’s 7.30 on Thursday night, Keating argued that Australia had made itself a target for aggression by joining the military alliance with the US and the UK in implicit opposition to China’s growing power in the Asia Pacific region.

Australia had no quarrel with China, Keating said, and concerns about China’s designs on Taiwan were not justified because the island was “Chinese real estate”.

“Taiwan is not a vital Australian interest,” he said, adding that the American attitude to Taiwan was like China deciding that Tasmania needed help to secede from Australia.

“What Aukus is about in the American mind is turning [Australia into suckers], locking us up for 40 years with American bases all around … not Australian bases,” he said.

“So Aukus is really about, in American terms, the military control of Australia. I mean, what’s happened … is likely to turn Australia into the 51st state of the United States.”

Keating told the show’s presenter, Sarah Ferguson: “We’re now defending the fact that we’re in Aukus.

“If we weren’t in Aukus, we wouldn’t need to defend it. If we didn’t have an aggressive ally like the United States – aggressive to others in the region – there’d be nobody attacking Australia. We are better left alone than we are being ‘protected’ by an aggressive power like the United States.

“Australia is capable of defending itself.

“There’s no way another state can invade a country like Australia with an armada of ships without it all failing. I mean, Australia is quite capable of defending itself. We don’t need to be basically a pair of shoes hanging out of the Americans’ backside.”

Keating, a longstanding opponent of Labor’s support for the pact, said Australia had not been threatened by China, whose expanding military presence, he said, was in line with its position as the world’s second superpower.

“What do they expect [the Chinese] to do?” he said. “To move around in row boats? Canoes, maybe? You know, so they develop their own submarines, their own frigates, their own aircraft carriers. They are the other major state in the world. What the Americans say – ‘No, no. Keep your place. Go back to your canoes.’”

His comments came as Richard Marles, the defence minister, and Penny Wong, the foreign affairs minister, have been in Washington for talks about the pact and a new agreement to cover the transfer of nuclear material to Australia under the deal.

Marles said the new agreement was “a very significant step down the Aukus path” and hailed it as another demonstration of the fact “that we are making this happen”.

The new agreement will allow for the transfer of nuclear material to Australia as part of the process of acquiring nuclear-powered submarines, and it replaces a pre-existing agreement that allowed “for the exchange of naval nuclear propulsion information”.

Australian government sources have since outlined some of the details of the new agreement, including that it will enable the transfer of Virginia-class submarines from the US from the 2030s. They also said the agreement would pave the way to making Australia’s future SSN-Aukus submarines in South Australia, by enabling the transfer of material and equipment such as “sealed, welded-shut reactors that will not require re-fuelling over the life cycle of the submarine”.

Australian sources insisted that the agreement would not see Australia take spent fuel or high-level radioactive waste from the UK or the US, nor did it require Australia to enrich uranium or process spent nuclear fuel.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/aug/08/aukus-pact-will-turn-australia-into-51st-state-of-the-us-says-paul-keating

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Anthony Albanese brushes off criticism by former Labor PM Paul Keating

Former Labor prime minister Paul Keating has taken another swipe at the Albanese government’s support of the AUKUS nuclear subs deal.

Joanne Williamson - August 9, 2024

Paul Keating has taken another swipe at the Albanese Labor government’s national security policies, saying it should be “celebrating the rise” of China instead of turning Australia into “a US protectorate”.

The former prime minister started his brutal assessment of Labor’s defence policy in an interview on ABC’s 7.30 on Thursday, where he said the government’s embrace of the AUKUS nuclear submarines deal was “likely to turn Australia into the 51st state of the United States”.

“This is a party which has adopted the defence and foreign policies of the Morrison Liberal government. This is a sellout,” Mr Keating said.

But Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was unperturbed by the views of the 80-year-old Mr Keating, who was voted out of office 28 years ago.

“Paul was a great prime minister – that ended in 1996,” Mr Albanese told reporters in Perth on Friday.

“Paul has his views. They’re well known.

“The world has changed between 1996 and 2024. My government is doing what we need to do today, and everyone will get a go here.”

Mr Keating, who has been vocal in his criticism of the tripartite deal between Australia, the UK and US since it was announced in 2021 when Scott Morrison was prime minister, took another shot at Mr Albanese late on Friday.

Mr Keating said Mr Albanese had put Australia on a path to becoming a “US protectorate” in Asia when the nation should be “celebrating the rise of China”.

“The fact is, the Albanese government is returning to the Anglosphere to garner Australia’s security,” Mr Keating said in a statement.

“In effect, the Albanese government is doing the very thing that all my life, I had trenchantly opposed, and in the post-War years, Labor had opposed.

“And that is, finding our security from Asia rather than our security in Asia.”

Mr Keating said the Albanese government’s move to expand US military presence in Australia with more troop movements would leave the nation as a “continental extension of American power”.

“Such an outcome is likely to turn the Australian government, in defence and security terms, into simply the national administrator of what would be broadly viewed in Asia as a US protectorate,” he said.

Mr Keating said the government had opted to see Beijing as an “imminent threat”, rather than “recognising and celebrating the rise of China … and dealing with it diplomatically.”

In response to Mr Keating’s AUKUS comments, Defence Minister Richard Marles said he was entitled to his views, but said Australia was facing “the most complex strategic circumstances that we’ve had to deal with since the end of the Second World War.”

“Characterising our relationship with the United States in that way is not right, nor is it fair,” Mr Marles said from Canada.

Meanwhile, Mr Albanese and Mr Marles have defended the AUKUS deal after US President Joe Biden updated Congress.

Mr Biden sent a letter to the US Congress on Thursday, updating the deal that would allow for the transfer of nuclear material to Australia.

Mr Marles said this did not mean nuclear waste would end up in Australia.

“That is the agreement that we reached with the UK and the US back in March of last year and so all this is doing is providing for the legal underpinning of that,” he told ABC radio.

“So to be completely clear, there is no circumstance in which we will be taking waste from any other country.

“We made clear in March of last year that we will be responsible for our own nuclear waste and that will involve the disposal of the spent nuclear reactors.”

Mr Albanese said the updated AUKUS agreement would not involve the transfer of nuclear waste.

“There’ll be no nuclear transfer from either the US or the UK That’s the detail. That’s very clear, and that’s not part of the arrangement,” Mr Albanese said.

“We’ve agreed to have nuclear-powered submarines. That’s what we’ve agreed to and the transfer of technology that’s related to that.”

https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/breaking-news/anthony-albanese-brushes-off-criticism-by-former-labor-pm-paul-keating/news-story/75c5d1f19774751b2daf14f276caa710

https://x.com/TroyBramston/status/1821772624760074729