Paul Keating
Paul Keating was the prime minister of Australia from 1991 to 1996.
Paul's recent articles
4 April 2025
Keating says Trump’s tariffs mean death knell for NATO and ANZUS
Former Australian prime minister Paul Keating says Donald Trump’s neo-Monroeism has made it clear that America now calls only the Western hemisphere home.
27 December 2024
Best of 2024: The military control of Australia
The Albanese government with their policy is likely to turn Australia into the 51st state of the United States, writes former Prime Minister of Australia, Paul Keating.
12 November 2024
Australians pierce the foreign policy propaganda of both major parties
A Resolve Political Monitor poll published in today’s Sydney Morning Herald makes clear that the Australian community at large possesses a contrary view to the foreign policy priorities of the Albanese government and its predecessor under Scott Morrison.
28 September 2024
Marles, with all pretension, flogging a dead seahorse
Richard Marles and his mate, the US defence secretary, are beginning to wilt under the weight of sustained comment in Australia critical of the AUKUS arrangement.
14 August 2024
Nancy Pelosi: ‘Pot calling the kettle black’
Nancy Pelosi said of my recent 7.30 interview ‘it is not in the security interest of the Asia-Pacific region for people to talk that way’ – that is, of my remarks in respect of Taiwan.
10 August 2024
Desperate in our search for security from Asia we are becoming a US protectorate
In responding to comments made by me overnight in respect of AUKUS and defence arrangements with the United States, the Prime Minister says ‘the world has changed between 1996 and 2024’. He says, ‘the world is different’.
9 August 2024
The military control of Australia
The Albanese government with their policy is likely to turn Australia into the 51st state of the United States, writes former Prime Minister of Australia, Paul Keating.
31 July 2024
AUKUS servility just one facet of poor governance
Richard Marles has the Navy out in force firing torpedoes at AUKUS critics.
24 June 2024
Peter Dutton: climate denialist – peddler of danger
Peter Dutton is a charlatan – an inveterate climate change denialist.
11 April 2024
A craven acceptance of US strategic hegemony in Asia
The Financial Review, if it wishes to remain relevant, requires a monster dose of reality - a de-lousing of its misplaced strategic ideology and its craven acceptance of US strategic hegemony in Asia, a region where not one US state resides.
3 April 2024
Appointment of Samantha Mostyn as Governor-General
I congratulate Samantha Mostyn on her appointment as Governor-General. Such an appointment is a great honour.
21 March 2024
Restoring appropriate equilibrium between our two countries
This morning I had a one hour five minute meeting with the Chinese Foreign Minister Mr Wang Yi.
18 March 2024
Visit to Australia by Chinese Foreign Minister HE Wang Yi
The Chinese Foreign Minister, Mr Wang Yi, is in Australia this week to participate in the China-Australia Foreign and Strategic Dialogue with his Australian counterpart, Foreign Minister Penny Wong.
5 March 2024
Penny Wong rattles the China can
It doesnt take much to encourage Penny Wong, sporting her deeply concerned frown, to rattle the China can a can she gave a good shake to yesterday.
22 February 2024
Lifting the sense of ourselves
For anyone seeking an understanding of what Paul Keatings public life was all about, his acceptance speech on the occasion of his life membership of the Labor Party in 1999 is required reading.
5 February 2024
The death of Lowitja ODonoghue
Lowitja ODonoghue was a great Indigenous woman. A very great one.
15 January 2024
The Chilcot Report: John Howard should be held in contempt by every thinking Australian
Former Australian Prime Minister John Howard has visited on Australia the whole spectre of terrorism, through his craven and ill-judged support of the United States and its invasion of Iraq. Now we live perpetually with the spectre of terrorism and racial strife, visited upon us by his prejudices and lack of judgment.
1 December 2023
Unconscionable profits
The Canadian private equity fund Brookfields bid for Origin Energy has the sole aim of delivering unconscionable profits to investors. But the rest of us have to know we are in the company of the masters of the universe and click our heels whenever we are given the cue from their obedient investment banks.
30 November 2023
The death of Henry Kissinger: Statement by Paul Keating
Henry Kissingers death draws to a close the epoch of intellectualism in foreign policy to which he was committed following his early study of and belief in a system of organised strategic balance and restraint of the kind that emerged from the Treaty of Westphalia in the 17th century.
4 November 2023
Bill Hayden warned that becoming a US supplicant carried unacceptable risks
Bill Hayden rescued and resuscitated the Labor Party as a national force as certainly as I am standing before you today. We may see the likes of Bill Hayden again, but I doubt it. At Bills initiative, in 1983 he put into place a review of ANZUS, suggesting that Australia presenting as a sycophant or supplicant would carry unacceptable risks, where our interests would simply be subsumed by Washington.
29 October 2023
Herald Sun report on support for Zionist Federation letter untrue
Todays Melbourne Herald Sun carries a story that, along with other former Australian Prime Ministers, I will be a signature to a statement drafted by The Zionist Federation of Australia, condemning the attack by Hamas on Israel. This report is without foundation and is untrue.
23 October 2023
The Hayden Oration - 29 September 2017
Australias relationship with the United States is fine. What is not fine is the Austral-Americans in this country conducting themselves as though Australia is some branch office of the United States or worse than that, its lickspittle.
21 October 2023
Death of Bill Hayden - A statement from Paul Keating
A modernising Treasurer, the author and founder of Medicare, the re-shaper and builder of the post-War Labor Party, Foreign Minister and finally, in high office, Governor General.
25 September 2023
Leadership from Paul Keating on recognition of Aboriginal dispossession -1992
Nowhere in the world, I would venture, is the message more stark than it is in Australia. We simply cannot sweep injustice aside. ... the starting point might be to recognise that the problem starts with us non-Aboriginal Australians. It begins, I think, with that act of recognition. ... Down the years, there has been no shortage of guilt, but it has not produced the responses we need. Guilt is not a very constructive emotion. I think what we need to do is open our hearts a bit. All of us.
9 July 2023
NATOs provocative lurch eastward and the 'supreme fool' Jens Stoltenberg
President Macron of France is right to warn NATO away from any expansion into Asia, reminding all and sundry of NATOs Atlantic design and focus.
8 June 2023
AUKUS, Australia and China
Australias capacity to protect its sovereignty lies not in accession to US interests but in a broad diplomatic and security effort with our Asian neighbours, writes Paul Keating in a letter delivered to Prime Minister Albanese on 24 January, seven weeks before the San Diego AUKUS announcement and obtained by the Guardian Australia under FOI laws.
17 April 2023
Never before has a Labor Government been so bereft of policy ambition
In facing the great challenge of our time, a super-state resident in continental Asia and an itinerant naval power seeking to maintain primacy the foreign minister was unable to nominate a single piece of strategic statecraft by Australia that would attempt a solution for both powers. Paul Keating's response to Foreign Minister Penny Wong's speech at the National Press Club, 17 April 2023.
15 March 2023
Paul Keating - Australia locks in Asian Century as subordinate to the US
The Albanese Governments complicity in joining with Britain and the United States in a tripartite build of a nuclear submarine for Australia under the AUKUS arrangements represents the worst international decision by an Australian Labor government since the former Labor leader, Billy Hughes, sought to introduce conscription to augment Australian forces in World War One.
7 March 2023
If only our current PM said this...
Todays Sydney Morning Herald and The Age front page stories on Australias supposed war risk with China represents the most egregious and provocative news presentation of any newspaper I have witnessed in over fifty years of active public life.
24 February 2023
The "little Americans" that populate Australia
Greg Sheridan, in his opinion piece of Tuesday 21 February, provides yet another display of his spiteful, vacuous journalism his erroneous claims that I am not the progenitor of the APEC Leaders Meeting, and that my views on Australian strategic policy are eccentric and at odds with the US alliance.
13 January 2023
The Liberal Democratic Party of Japan, the Bourbons of the Pacific
The Japanese are hanging out for some Quad which has us, the Americans and the Indians in it. I mean, this is the kind of hopeless environment we're in. China is simply too big and too central to be ostracised.
30 December 2022
Australia and Asia in 2022: knowing who we are
In the eighties, we took hold of the rudder and set about an essential economic transformation which left us able to hold our own in Asia. The key to our success then rested with ourselves. What was needed was cultural reform, reform of our outlook. Success at home depended on that change. Success in Asia depended on it too. It depended on establishing beyond doubt, that Asia is where our future lies; that we can and must go there; and that this course we are on is irreversible.
28 December 2022
Best of 2022: 25 Years ago, I warned expanding NATO ranked with the errors that led to WWI and II
Expanding NATOs military demarcation point to the very borders of the former Soviet Union was an error which may rank with the strategic miscalculations which prevented Germany from taking its full place in the international system at the beginning of this century.
5 October 2022
25 Years ago, I warned expanding NATO ranked with the errors that led to WWI and II
Expanding NATOs military demarcation point to the very borders of the former Soviet Union was an error which may rank with the strategic miscalculations which prevented Germany from taking its full place in the international system at the beginning of this century.
5 October 2022
US ring-fencing of Russia weakened those prepared to give liberal democratic principles a go
When the Russians surrendered their empire in 1990, wouldnt it have been better to have Russia as part of an enlightened framework of intelligent co-existence, to invite their people, battered by the twentieth century, into the comity and wealth of nations?
27 September 2022
Taiwan "is not a vital Australian interest we do not recognise it as a sovereign state". A repost from November 17, 2021
Peter Hartcher has a lot to answer for, writes Paul Keating in a response to the Nine columnist that did not make it to print.
25 July 2022
A reckless and provocative visit by Pelosi to Taiwan
When the United States has a divided foreign policy on an issue of such grave importance, the world begins a slide onto very thin ice.
15 March 2022
NATO creeping towards Russia's borders is dangerous-(I told you so twenty five years ago)
A great security mistake is being made in Europe with the decision to expand NATO.(An extract from a speech in 1997)
22 January 2022
Herald indulges UK Foreign Secretarys demented remarks on China
Australia's foreign and defence ministers are giving respectability to Britain's lunge for old-time glory.
30 December 2021
Paul Keating responds to Peter Hartcher's 'King Canute' column
Peter Hartcher has a lot to answer for, writes Paul Keating in a response to the Nine columnist that did not make it to print.
29 September 2021
Paul Keating: I am not a defeatist who would sell the country out to another power
The Coalition is not only turning over control of our defence forces to the US, but shopping our foreign policy too.
22 September 2021
Paul Keating: Morrison is making an enemy of China and Labor is helping him
The Liberals, having no faith in the capacity of Australians and all we have created here, could not resist falling back, yet again, to do the bidding of another great power, the United States of America.
5 September 2021
Provoking China to please the US.
The Morrison government is pushing Australia towards a confrontation with Beijing, mainly to be seen as a fawning acolyte in Washington.