Paul Keating can be his own worst enemy but his AUKUS spray raises big questions about China, defence, that have slipped us by

The Australian prime minister travelled all the way from New Delhi to San Diego last weekend to bask in the spectacle of standing with the US president and the UK prime minister amid naval bands, submarines and sailors, to announce the biggest military hardware spend in Australia’s history.

Yet, by the end of the week, all that imagery and hoopla had largely disappeared from the column inches devoted by the media to the story, along with much analysis of what the deal actually entails, to be replaced by commentary about whether a 79-year-old man had been mean to senior members of the government, and to a bunch of journalists.

In early 1989, Paul Keating’s famed economic policy levers as treasurer were looking for all the world like they weren’t quite working as they should. Interest rates had started to rise and his argument that you could use monetary policy to deal with a current account deficit was under question.

Then-treasurer Paul Keating at the National Press Club in 1989.(National Archives of Australia )

I bumped into him in a corridor in Parliament House and asked him what he was going to do.

“You know me, love,” he cheerily declared, “Downhill, one ski, no poles.”

And it has been ever thus with Keating: careering wildly down the fast slope of politics, knocking out bystanders and those who get in his way as he goes.

Where he has led our national debate in the process, though, has been, and should always be, more important than the roadkill incurred along the way.

Keating’s profoundly important questions

This week, the former prime minister was still doing it: sinking holes below the waterline in the too-comfortable bipartisan consensus around AUKUS that has seen us embrace a huge change in our strategic, defence, political and economic environment with an alarming lack of real discussion.

His savage mouth thrills some and appals others. Often its worst victim is Keating himself because it can both distract from, and diminish, the power of his arguments.

But you don’t even have to agree with his assessment to realise he is posing profoundly important questions that have just slipped us by in this current debate.

Most significant of these, as another former cabinet minister said this week, is that “the China ‘threat’ is now a given and never questioned”.

Critics of Keating say he is out of touch and has too soft a view of China.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was making this argument this week in trying to defend himself and his foreign and defence ministers from Keating’s caustic assessment.

The problem for the government — and the China hawks — is that they haven’t alternatively defined what they think the China threat really is.

They might poo-poo the former PM’s argument that the only type of threat China can pose is if it plans to invade Australia.

But what is it we are actually trying to achieve here?

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume.WatchDuration: 1 minute 35 seconds1m 35s Paul Keating says Defence is now running foreign affairs policy.Bipartisanship has robbed us of serious debate 

The Chinese military build-up is without doubt alarming. The ruthless approach of “President for Life” and strongman Xi Jinping has changed the way we think about China. Talk of war over Taiwan has gone quickly in a few years from hypothetical to seeming very real.

But that doesn’t explain why we have moved from a strategic position based on the idea of “Defence of Australia” to, in the next 20 years, a Forward Defence position built around a fleet of second-hand nuclear-powered submarines that sit in the South China Sea.

What are they supposed to be doing?

Keating says they are there to take out Chinese submarines before they get far out of port.

US President Joe Biden announces the AUKUS partnership after a meeting with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.(Reuters: Leah Millis)

If we discount the prospect of imminent Chinese invasion and consider lower-level conflict in the region between China and its neighbours, are those submarines just there to deter the Chinese from getting too many big ideas?

Or is Keating right in saying we are locking ourselves in to support continued United States hegemony over the Pacific?

What is Australia’s position on conflict between the United States and China over Taiwan?

The now opposition leader and then defence minister Peter Dutton declared in late 2021 that it “would be inconceivable that we wouldn’t support the US in an action [over Taiwan] if the US chose to take that action”. Last year, he stepped back somewhat from that position.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong — who unfairly copped a savaging from Keating this week — has been at pains for months to dial right back the rhetoric on Taiwan.

But the government’s thinking about whether we would become involved in a dispute over Taiwan is surely a threshold test for understanding our strategic environment.

Unfortunately, bipartisanship has robbed us of any serious debate. There is hardly a mention of China in the government’s rationale for what it has done, even if everyone knows that is what is at issue.

We have got to this point because in 2021 Scott Morrison announced the AUKUS deal in a similarly contrived media event to the one we saw in San Diego.

The then Labor opposition leadership was briefed on the “top secret” plan the afternoon before it was announced, and Albanese declared Labor’s full support the next day, without a proper or measured cabinet consideration of the proposal or the intelligence on which it was based.

This was about politics and ensuring Labor was not vulnerable to a national security “wedge” in the looming federal election. And Labor clearly now thinks it has the scope to do a reverse “wedgie” on the Coalition, entrenching itself with this announcement as the national security party.

Another conversation has gone quiet

But a national government cannot make such a huge strategic commitment, let alone a financial one, without explaining itself to the country, just because there is a cosy silence between the parties on the matter.

Peter Varghese, a former head of the Office of National Assessments and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, wrote in the Financial Review this week that “decisions of this magnitude can easily emerge in an echo chamber”.

“But I would have thought that before we took decisions as momentous as the AUKUS submarines that there would be a proper and forensic public discussion about other options and their underlying rationale,” he said.

Before this week, “sovereignty” was a word being bandied about quite a lot in relation to AUKUS.(Reuters: Leah Millis)

Varghese observed that there are “strategic costs to weakening the discipline behind the Defence of Australia doctrine if that is where we are heading”.

It ties our fate more closely to “the mistaken view that we can always rely on the United States to come to our defence”.

“Mistaken, not because the US is unreliable or feckless, not because the alliance is no longer central to our security, not even because Donald Trump or his ilk might return to the White House. It is mistaken because countries always act in their own interests and great powers even more so.

“To anchor policy on any other assumption is to ignore history.”

Before this week, “sovereignty” was a word being bandied about quite a lot in relation to AUKUS. The argument was we needed a sovereign capability to build, maintain and operate whatever submarine fleet we got; there were questions about who would actually be in charge of US-built boats that our sailors (actually, we don’t have enough) were not trained to run; how these boats would be deployed and by whom; and what it would mean to have a growing number of US troops and assets being rotated through Australia.

That conversation, too, seems to have gone a little quiet, unlike the 79-year-old former prime minister.

Laura Tingle is 7.30’s chief political correspondent.

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume.WatchDuration: 7 minutes 7 seconds7m Why is the AUKUS submarine pact such a big deal?