FORMER Australian prime minister Paul Keating added his voice today to growing unease over his country’s Aukus nuclear submarine pact with the United States and Britain, warning that the deal serves US interests, not Australia’s.

Mr Keating said that mooted plans to buy US-made Virginia class submarines would simply mean Canberra paying the costs of “a US force directed by the United States.”

And he mocked the idea that engagement with former colonial power Britain — whose monarch Queen Elizabeth II remains head of state in Australia, a role that was key to the constitutional coup against left-leaning prime minister Gough Whitlam in 1975 – could make up for a lack of engagement with a rising China. Britain is “an old theme park sliding into the Atlantic,” he charged.

Mr Keating, who headed a Labour government in 1991-96, said that he believed the role of the submarines in US strategy would be to contain Chinese submarines close to China’s coast, so as to limit Beijing’s “second strike nuclear capability” — the ability to retaliate if subjected to a first nuclear strike by the United States. 

Besides being unlikely to work – “it’ll be like throwing a handful of toothpicks at a mountain” – this strategic role would fundamentally change Australia’s place in Chinese cold war calculations, he warned.

Mr Keating is not the only former premier to have criticised the Aukus pact. Kevin Rudd, who held office in 2007-10 and again in 2013, has said that Australia’s lack of a civil nuclear industry meant that its new submarines would be entirely dependent on the US, with “a long-term impact … on Australian sovereignty.”