How hard is it to stick to traditional Labor policy? Former Treasurer and Prime Minister Paul Keating is aghast at Labor's knee-jerk reaction to the budget. Credit:Peter Morris/Lowy Institute The former Labor leader said he was not arguing against a US presence in east Asia because Washington was an important "balancer and conciliator" in the region. "Nor do we want China to be the dominant state in east Asia, [because] we need the US here as the floating good guys, floating their boats around." But he said the idea that "China is going to be a strategic client of the United States is nonsense. What [China] is doing in the South China Sea, they are marking out space like a tiger does, you know, a tiger rubs itself against the trees to let any other ones that turn up know this is our space." "Great states need strategic space and if you don't give it to them, they will take it ..." "The central stabilising force in east Asia is China, not Japan and I think this will dawn on the Americans.

He said the Chinese were trying to superintend just "the corner of one ocean" while the Americans were "trying to superintend three oceans. ... it can't be done. So the pivot was bound to fail and will fail." The "pivot" was the term former US president Barack Obama used to describe a more muscular US posture in Asia, particularly in the sensitive waters of the South China Sea where China has been militarising a series of small islands. Mr Keating took a cautiously optimistic line about the Trump presidency, despite warning last November that Australia should " cut the tag" with Washington after the presidential election. He said he had "taken some heart from the fact that he [Donald Trump] seems to have developed a reasonable relationship with [Chinese leader] Xi Jinping at the meeting they had in Florida and also the fact that the Chinese have put their hands up again to do something about North Korea." He said his remark about cutting the tag had been misinterpreted as a call to end the US alliance.

"If we had no document any more [setting out ANZUS] we would remain friends with the United States into the future", Mr Keating said. "We have been in every battle ... since the First World War, we have got a whole lot of historic, cultural common ground, and so the idea that we have to as a sort of client state shape up all the time, or ship out" was wrong. "The idea that we go steaming through the South China Sea.... this is not our fight. Telling the Americans 'this is not our fight and we're not in it' is something that we should do.'" He said France and Canada both enjoyed a "normal" relationship with the US despite occasional differences on global affairs. Australia should be running an independent foreign policy within the alliance structure, he said, not being "the Uriah Heep of this world dragging along behind [the US]".

Washington has "done fantastic things for the world but also makes mistakes, and therefore Australia should put its interests first and within the context of this alliance, which is never going to fade away." Loading "I've always believed we had to find our security in Asia and not from Asia." He said there little to " yodel about" in Australian foreign policy to date, but that involvement in the East Asian Summit, the G20 and APEC were "the first blooms ... [of ] a much more independent frame of mind where self reliance and self starting is the motivation, not sitting back waiting for a friend as we are still doing to tell us where we should go."