Morrison government provokes China to please US: former Australian PM

CANBERRA - Former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating criticized the Morrison government for provoking China to please the United States in an opinion piece on Friday.

In an article carried by the Australian Financial Review, Keating said that the current government "is wantonly leading Australia into a strategic dead end by its needless provocations against China."

He noted that China is not "attacking or forcibly incorporating countries into a grand union," nor is it "exporting some kind of universal ideology."

He argued that Australia, many flight hours away from China, has no territorial disputes with the latter.

"Yet the government, both through its foreign policy incompetence and fawning compulsion to please America, effectively has us in a cold war with China," he said.

Keating also talked about Australian Defence Minister Peter Dutton, saying the minister's baseless implication that China might be a military aggressor is actually "a posture China has never shown any sign of."

"The Morrison government is needlessly and irresponsibly pushing Australia towards a headlong confrontation with China -- and doing it, in the main, to be seen in Washington as America's fawning acolyte," he concluded.

He warned that the notion of Australia's right to an independent foreign policy is being suborned by a government "determined to subordinate its interests to those of another country."

Citing a time when Australian conservatives in the 1930s and 1940s put their strategic faith in Britain, Keating said that the government today has the same fear of abandonment and placed their faith in the United States.