Paul Keating launches scathing attack on Penny Wong as he calls for security chief to be fired over China comments

Paul Keating has launched another brutal broadside at Foreign Secretary Penny Wong, while calling for the ASIO boss to be sacked for revealing that an alleged, albeit anonymous, MP is a Chinese spy.

The former Labor prime minister, who sat on the board of the Communist Party-run China Development Bank from 2005 to 2018, said Senator Wong had been co-opted into a “nonsense pro-US stance”.

In a speech to coincide with the ASEAN summit in Melbourne, Senator Wong said the Southeast Asian region faces “destabilizing, provocative and coercive actions”, in a thinly veiled swipe at China and its perceived expansionism.

Keating said Senator Wong’s “concerns” had been unceremoniously refuted by Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, who refused to accept Australia’s anti-China stance.

“It doesn’t take much to encourage Penny Wong, sporting her ‘deeply concerned’ scowl, to shake the can of China, a can she gave a good shake yesterday,” Mr Keating said.

‘Anwar Ibrahim, the Prime Minister of Malaysia, threw a huge stone in Wong’s pond by telling Australia not to put Australia’s problems with China on ASEAN.

“Anwar is making clear that Malaysia, for its part, is not buying into US hegemony in East Asia, and that states are being pressured to protect China along the way.”

Mr Keating argued that “Australia and Australian policy are at odds with the general tenor of ASEAN’s perceived strategic interests”.

“That is, interests related to China and the United States and the relations between them,” he said.

The iconic Labor figure also criticized ASIO boss Mike Burgess, who he said was running a “thug show” after the spy chief claimed a now-retired MP had “sold out his country” to a foreign power , which was later identified as China.

Keating was unimpressed by this revelation, comparing it to highly stylized traditional Japanese kabuki theater and saying it was a coordinated attempt to blacken China.

“The kabuki show goes like this: (Mike) Burgess drops the claim, then out of nowhere the Herald and The Age seem to miraculously solve the mystery – it turns out the villain is China after all,” Mr Keating said .

“When the Albanian government was elected, the first decision it should have made was to remove Burgess, (Office of National Intelligence Director General) Andrew Shearer and (former Home Affairs Secretary) Mike Pezzullo… unbelievably, Burgess and Shearer still remain at the center of the security apparatus of a Labor government,” he said.

‘This says more about the government than about them.

‘These people show complete disregard for the so-called stabilization process that the Prime Minister decided and has advanced with China and will do anything to destabilize any meaningful rapprochement.

“Burgess runs the main bully show while Shearer does everything in his power to encourage Australia to become the 51st state of the United States.”

When asked about Mr Keating’s comments, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was forced to deny that Australia was sending mixed messages about China with a brusque “no”.

Last year, Keating launched a series of withering attacks on the Albanese government for signing the AUKUS nuclear submarine pact he inherited from the Morrison government.

Keating accused the Albanian government of agreeing to the $360 billion deal in just 24 hours and questioned its competence.

‘How would you do this in 24 hours?’ asked Mr. Keating.

‘You can only do this if you do not have the perceptive capacity to understand the weight of the decisions you are asked to make.

‘It’s what other people call incompetence. I’ll call it maybe “try.”

Calling it the worst decision by a Labor government since the First World War, when Prime Minister Billy Hughes supported conscription, Keating said the entire deal was based on the false notion that China posed a direct threat to Australia.

“This is a distortion and it is not true,” Mr. Keating said of this idea.

“The Chinese have never implied that they would threaten us nor have they explicitly said so.”

The former prime minister, famous for his acid tongue, attacked Senator Wong’s foreign policy conduct.

‘Running around the Pacific Islands with a necklace around your neck handing out money, which is what Penny does, is not foreign policy. “It’s a consular task,” said Mr. Keating.