It was New South Wales premier Jack Lang who mentored former Australian prime minister Paul Keating and it was Lang who said, ‘Always back the horse named self-interest, son. It’ll be the only one trying.’

It’s hard not to see where Keating’s interests lie these days. Like an antique cuckoo clock, he pops out whenever he thinks China’s interests have been crossed by Australian politicians and the ‘nutters’ running Australia’s security organisations.

On Monday, during a joint press conference with Prime Minister Albanese, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim warned Australia and the US not to impose their ‘China-phobia’ on others. This obviously resonated with Keating.

On the same day, Foreign Minister Penny Wong warned the region faced the most ‘confronting circumstances’ for decades and called for the creation of ‘preventative architecture’ to avoid disputes turning into conflict due to ‘destabilising, provocative and coercive actions, including unsafe conduct at sea and in the air, and militarisation of disputed features’.

Suggesting that China poses a threat infuriates Keating. When the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age reported last year that war with China was possible within three years Keating described it as ‘the most egregious and provocative news presentation in five decades’.

Within 24 hours of Wong’s speech, Keating popped out of his box saying, ‘It doesn’t take much to encourage Penny Wong, sporting her “deeply concerned” frown, to rattle the China can – a can she gave a good shake yesterday’.

According to Keating, Prime Minister Ibrahim had ‘dropped a huge rock into Wong’s pond by telling Australia not to piggyback Australia’s problems with China onto Asean’. Keating concluded that the Asean meeting made clear Australia’s policy on China and the US is at odds with ‘the general tenor of Asean’s perceived strategic interests’.

In fact, Asean’s elder statesman, Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong backed the Albanese government over the Aukus nuclear-powered submarines, completely undermining Keating’s claim that Australia was at odds with the region. But attacking Wong’s foreign policy is familiar territory for Keating. He took a swipe at her in a tirade he delivered at the National Press Club last March saying, ‘Let me just make this point. Running around the Pacific Islands with a lei around your neck handing out money, which is what Penny does, is not foreign policy’.

One doesn’t have to be a foreign policy wonk to recognise that Wong’s South Pacific diplomacy was launched to try to counter China’s stealth security agreement with the Solomon Islands that was revealed in the dying days of the Morrison government.

While he was out of his box, Keating took the opportunity to launch a scathing attack on the Australian strategic policy establishment which he detests for pushing a ‘mindless pro-American stance’ and said that the Albanese government should have sacked Asio chief Mike Burgess and Andrew Shearer (head of the Office of National Assessment).

Keating accuses Burgess of being ‘the resident conjuror’ running ‘the primary goon show’ revealing a ‘week’s worth of spy mysteries’ during a ‘kabuki show’ in which ‘the villain, as it turns out, is China’. Shearer, he says, is doing ‘all in his power to encourage Australia into becoming the 51st state of the United States’.

This is old ground for Keating as well. As far back as 2019 he said, ‘When the security agencies are running foreign policy, the nutters are in charge’.

Keating once said of Liberal opposition leader John Hewson, ‘He’s wound up like a thousand-day clock! One (more half) turn and there’ll be springs and sprockets all over the building. Mr Speaker, give him a valium’. Perhaps someone should get Keating a prescription.

What most infuriates Keating is Aukus. In September 2021, he accused then-Liberal prime minister Scott Morrison of ‘shopping’ Australia’s national sovereignty by ‘locking’ Australia and its military into the ‘force structure of the United States’ through the Aukus deal.

With his usual understatement, he said, ‘It takes a monster level of incompetence to forfeit military control of one’s own state but this is what Scott Morrison and his government have managed to do’. In signing up to Aukus, Australia was ‘turning its back on the 21st century, the century of Asia, for the jaded and faded Anglosphere’.

Keating’s ire only increased when Labor, under Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, backed the Aukus agreement. In March 2023 he called it the ‘worst deal in all history’ and ‘the worst international decision’ taken by a Labor government since Billy Hughes attempted to introduce conscription during the first world war. According to Keating, in accepting the Aukus agreement Albanese had ‘screwed into place the last shackle in the long chain which the Americans have laid out to contain China’.

China announced a defence budget this week of US$231 billion, an increase of over 7 per cent compared with the previous year. It’s part of a long-term increase in defence spending. Yet in the world according to Keating, China is only a threat to Australia because of our relationship with the United States. He claims that China poses no threat to Australia but ‘by determinedly casting China as an enemy… (the government is) creating an enemy where none exists’.

Keating’s view is that China ‘is not the Soviet Union’ and the Chinese government would ‘fall over themselves to have a proper relationship’. The fault, according to Keating, lies only with Australia which has ‘manufactured a problem’ with China by preserving US ‘hegemony’ in East Asia and seeking to contain China. Then again, in the world according to Keating, Taiwan is a ‘civil matter’ for China.

According to Keating, ‘the great sin’ that China has committed in the eyes of the West is developing its economy to equal that of the US, and the US ‘would have preferred’ that 20 per cent of the world population remained in poverty.

This analysis fails to recognise that it is only China’s unfettered access to US markets, and those of other developed nations, access that it has refused to reciprocate, that has allowed it to grow so rapidly.

It also fails to acknowledge the fact that China’s poverty can be attributed entirely to the Chinese Communist party. Had it followed the path of Hong Kong, Singapore or Taiwan it would be far richer today.

Keating spent 13 years on the board of the China Development Bank, from 2005 to 2018, including ten as chairman, serving alongside people such as the former US Secretary of state Henry Kissinger. The China Development Bank funds large-scale infrastructure such as the Three Gorges Dam, Shanghai International Airport and International Belt and Road projects, but Keating pooh-poohs the idea that this creates a conflict of interest.

In his view ‘great states need strategic space’ and ‘China will want its space too’. His mantra is that ‘Australia must find its security in Asia; it cannot find its security from Asia’. What that means for the Western freedoms that Australians enjoy he doesn’t say. His view is that ‘Australia has to be a country which has the ‘Welcome’ sign out.’

Just not to the US or the UK.