Paul Keating has again accused the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age of misleading the public with their “irresponsible prediction” three years ago about a Chinese attack on Australia.
The former prime minister took the opportunity of the third anniversary of Nine newspapers’ Red Alert series to reiterate his disdain for the report and its lead author, international editor Peter Hartcher.
On March 7, 2023, the SMH and the Age published an alarming front page warning of the threat of a “war with China within three years” by a panel of five national security experts.
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“The overwhelming source of danger to Australia comes from China,” the report says. “The nature of the threat extends to the prospect of full-scale war, and Australia would have to participate.
“While Canberra’s official guidance on timing is that Australia will have less than 10 years’ war notice, the five experts think this timeline is misleading. We need to be ready to fight in just three years, they found. Their review is titled accordingly: Red Alert.”
In a strongly worded statement released Friday, on the eve of those three years, Keating said: “None of the claims have come to fruition.”
Keating went on to label Hartcher a “scumbag,” adding to the list of insults he hurled at the journalist at the time of original publication, which included “psychopath” and “old drop of acid.”
Hartcher responded in part to the former prime minister’s criticism in a 2024 op-ed, arguing that Keating was “Australia’s leading apologist for the Chinese Communist Party” and accusing him of “bloodthirsty retreat mentality” and “autocratic tendencies.”
The Red Alert series was widely criticized as hysterical and hyperbolic by others, including Paul Barry at Media Watch.
Margaret Simons, writing in 2023 for Guardian Australia, spoke to a number of foreign affairs specialists who described the series as “pretentious”, “irresponsible” and implicitly racist in its depictions of China.
Keating said that then-editor Bevan Shields allowed Hartcher to “concoct a story about the China threat with the help of a hand-picked group of anti-China shills, to produce the most egregious and provocative news presentation I have ever witnessed in more than fifty years of active public life.”
“The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age’s ‘Red Alert’ series, packed with lurid images of Chinese military aircraft descending on Australia, represent one of the most shameful episodes in the history of Australian journalism,” their statement on Friday read.
Shields resigned as SMH editor last year and was replaced by Jordan Baker, who Keating said he hoped “might decide that amoral standards of journalism have no place in a newspaper.”
Keating went on to say that it was not China, but the United States, that had attacked other countries, “as witnessed by last weekend’s premeditated attack on Iran.”
“Apart from a brief border conflict with Vietnam in 1979, China has not attacked any state in barely half a century,” he said.
“But despite this delinquent and willful episode, Peter Hartcher remains to this day the international editor of both newspapers. How clumsy do you have to be before the management decides that your copy is worthless, before the management is forced to fire you?”
Nine and Hartcher declined to comment.
