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.”
Keating told the show’s presenter, Sarah Ferguson: “We’re now defending the fact that we’re in Aukus.
“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.
“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?” he said. “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, the foreign affairs 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 deal.
Marles said the new agreement was “a very significant step down the Aukus path” and hailed it as another demonstration of the fact “that we are making this happen”.
The new agreement will allow for the transfer of nuclear material to Australia as part of the process of acquiring nuclear-powered submarines, and it replaces a pre-existing agreement that allowed “for the exchange of naval nuclear propulsion information”.
Australian government sources have since outlined some of the details of the new agreement, including that it will enable the transfer of Virginia-class submarines from the US from the 2030s. They also said the agreement would pave the way to making Australia’s future SSN-Aukus submarines in South Australia, by enabling the transfer of material and equipment such as “sealed, welded-shut reactors that will not require re-fuelling over the life cycle of the submarine”.
Australian sources insisted that the agreement would not see Australia take spent fuel or high-level radioactive waste from the UK or the US, nor did it require Australia to enrich uranium or process spent nuclear fuel.
