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.”
“We’re now defending the fact that we’re in Aukus,” Keating told the show’s presenter Sarah Ferguson. “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,” he said.
“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? 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, foreign 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 terms of the deal.
The US president, Joe Biden, wrote to the US Congress yesterday to transmit the text of the agreement “for cooperation related to naval nuclear propulsion”.
In November 2021, the Aukus countries signed an agreement “for the exchange of naval nuclear propulsion information” to enable the three countries to work out “the optimal pathway” for Australia to acquire nuclear-powered submarines.
Source: theguardian.com
