It was former Labor foreign minister Gareth Evans who coined the term ‘relevance deprivation syndrome’ after Labor lost the federal election in 1996. Up to now, former Labor prime minister Paul Keating coped with his irrelevance by lashing out in public mostly to attack Australia’s foreign and defence policy in general and its relations with China in particular.

So well has Keating succeeded that he has become the nation’s Kowtower-in-Chief and this week Beijing promoted him to preferred Prime Minister. Even before he arrived China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi advised that he would meet with Keating who has been scathing in his attacks on Foreign Minister Penny Wong for daring to resist China’s efforts to buy support in the Solomon Islands, for defending Aukus, and for criticising Chinese aggression in the South China Sea.

Wang also advised that he would not front a joint press conference with Wong showing his contempt both for Wong and the media.

Perhaps piqued by the insult, Wong indicated that she would express concerns over Beijing’s suspended death sentence for Australian writer Yang Hengjun, raise China’s poor human rights record and its remaining trade bans on Australian exports.

Wang can hardly have been thrilled by his visit to New Zealand where the new-ish centre-right coalition led by the Nationals Christopher Luxon has indicated that it might join Pillar 2 of the Aukus defence pact which is focused on the development of advanced technologies and enhanced intelligence sharing. New Zealand Deputy PM and Foreign Minister Winston Peters also made clear Auckland’s concerns about human rights abuses in China and the deteriorating situation in the South China Sea.

When Albanese was dubbed ‘handsome boy’ by China’s Premier Li Kiang last November Australians were dumbfounded. Chinese communists are not known for their sense of humour but surely this had to be a joke and a not-so-sly putdown of the PM? After all, Albo, who was videoed on a morning walk on Shanghai’s Bund in a Rabbitohs cap and a yellow and green Matilda’s World Cup jersey is hardly an oil painting.

What eluded the commentariat was that the Chinese characters for Ant-ho-ny mean ‘handsome boy’. Chinese netizens gave him the sobriquet based on his friendly interaction with ‘a stranger’, who turned out to be the Australian’s China correspondent Will Glasgow, who filmed his interaction and posted it on social media. ‘This could never happen in China,’ commented the netizens, oblivious to the fact that it had happened in China but of course, it only happened because of Glasgow’s presence and he, like almost all foreign media, has been denied a visa to be based in China.

Albanese followed in the footsteps of his hero – Gough Whitlam – who, 50 years earlier, in 1973, was the first Australian prime minister to visit China. No doubt the Chinese Communist party cadres hoped Albanese would be a carbon copy of Whitlam but the ‘handsome boy’, despite the tirades from Keating, continues to treat the US as Australia’s primary security partner and maintains Australia’s commitment to Aukus, albeit with precious few financial resources.

So while Albanese is desperately trying to stabilise relations with China, China is destabilising the Albanese government.

Keating is also reshaping Australia’s national security discussion. A fortnight ago he launched a verbal assault on Australia’s security establishment, claiming it displayed ‘utter contempt’ for the Prime Minister’s stabilisation of relations, would do anything to destabilise rapprochement with Beijing, and said it was ‘unbelievable’ that Mike Burgess, the head of Asio, the domestic spy agency, and Andrew Shearer, the Director-General of the Office of National Intelligence, remain at the centre of a Labor government’s security apparatus.

Only two weeks later, Burgess and his international counterpart, Kerri Hartland, the head of our international spy agency, Asis, have lost their permanent places advising the National Security Committee of Cabinet.

Asio and Asis are the key agencies charged with protecting Australia from acts of espionage, foreign interference, terrorism, and sabotage of our defence systems and critical infrastructure including energy, water, telecommunications, ports, and threats to our border integrity.

If anyone is going to detect a threat from China the spooks in those agencies should, but Keating has succeeded in reducing their capacity to warn the government.

Keating’s attack came on Burgess just after Burgess revealed that a former politician had betrayed Australia to a country which was later revealed to be China, and had tried to ensnare a prime minister’s family member. Was there an element of payback? Labor’s concerted rejection that the traitor be outed has been taken to mean that the person came from its ranks.

That possibility was strengthened when Victorian Upper House MP Adem Somyurek, a former minister in then-premier Dan Andrews’s Labor government, used parliamentary privilege to allege his former friend and former federal Labor MP Anthony Byrne was the traitor. Burgess has said he will not divulge the traitor’s identity and Byrne has made no comment, but he was a member, from 2005 to 2022, of the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Intelligence and Security which has oversight of Australia’s security services, chaired it from 2010 to 2013 and was deputy chair from 2013 to 2022. Such a person could well be targeted by spies. Byrne was seen as a hawk rather than a dove on national security and played a key role in persuading the UK to reduce Huawei’s involvement in its broadband rollout to zero. This would have made him a person of keen interest to China which would want to curb his influence. Byrne was also close to former Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. He resigned his committee position after he admitted to corruption and branch stacking at Victoria’s Independent Broadband Anti-Corruption Commission and did not contest his seat in the 2022 federal election.

But while Asio and Asis are the spies sitting out in the cold, Sky News’ Sharri Markson broke the scoop that David Fredericks, the secretary of the Department of Climate Change, has attended the National Security committee providing a bizarre insight into what constitutes a threat in the minds of Albanese government officials.

In reality, Bowen’s lunatic climate policy is one of the most potent threats to Australia’s national security although there is nothing secret about that information. The relentless pursuit of 100 per cent renewable energy, the Californication as it were of our energy supply, will, if pursued to its logical conclusion, bankrupt Australians, destroy industry and agriculture, and reduce the country to a third-world economy. Yet even before we reach that destination through our deluded efforts, the sabotage of our critical infrastructure could take us there on a fast-track express.

Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen, a Keating confidant, defended the Wang/Keating meeting. He presumably played a role in the government quietly dropping its anti-dumping action against Chinese wind turbines before Wang’s visit. No doubt Bowen sees himself as a replacement PM for the ‘handsome boy’.

The Chinese characters for A-lb-a-ne-se translate as ‘dirty, joyful petal, sudden, astringent’. If ‘bruised, bitter, precious petal’ starts trending on WeChat we will know the ‘handsome boy’ has lost the Mandate of Heaven and Labor hopefuls will be sharpening their knives.