The former prime minister attacked the AUKUS agreement as Labor's 'worst international decision' since it attempted to introduce conscription.
, a foreign ministry spokesperson accusing the three countries of maintaining a "Cold War mentality".
"There's three leaders standing there. Only one is paying: our bloke! Albo. The other two, they've got the band playing, happy days are here again! The American President can hardly keep three coherent sentences together," Mr Keating said. “The only way the Chinese could threaten Australia or attack it is on land. That is, they bring an armada of ships with a massive army to invade us. This is not possible for the Chinese to do,” he said.“They'd need to come with 13 days of steaming - [there’s] 8,000km between Beijing, or Shanghai and Brisbane. In which case, we'd just sink them all.
“They would have preferred [China] remains in poverty, with 20 per cent of humanity, forever. But the fact that China is now an industrial economy, they say: That’s not in the playbook, what an affront. This is what this is about,” he said.
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