This wasteful folly continues today under the Albanese Government, with Assistant Minister for the Republic Matt Thistlethwaite roaming our vast land desperately trying to breathe life into the long-comatose republican movement.

As Malcolm Turnbull secretly admitted in his diary, months before the multi-million-dollar 1999 referendum, the Keating-Turnbull republic was doomed. “Nobody’s interested,” he wept.

UNINTERESTED

If Australians weren’t interested then, imagine how totally uninterested they are now.

Keating curiously never showed much interest in a republic before he ousted Bob Hawke. As former Labor leader, Governor-General Bill Hayden told our well-beloved Queen Elizabeth, the issue of republicanism was “a very handy one” for Keating.

“If he can get it to really take off,” Hayden wrote, “it would be a gift from heaven for him… (as) distractions like taxes, unemployment, the performance of the economy, etc, would tend to disappear.”

When the mainstream media declared it inevitable, some Liberal politicians, driven by naivety, opportunism, or both, foolishly jumped onto the republic bandwagon.

This turned it into Keating’s weapon par excellence, a distraction for voters and a wedge to divide Liberal politicians.

But, much to Keating’s chagrin, Alexander Downer and John Howard killed this off by promising – and then delivering – a convention to choose the best model republicans could devise to be put to the people in a referendum.

Keating’s republicanism proved so infectious among the elites that NSW Premier Bob Carr, determined to be remembered as co-father of “the” republic, expelled the governors from their domain, Sydney’s Government House.

This was so unpopular that Australians for Constitutional Monarchy’s leaders, Lloyd Waddy QC and Kerry Jones, filled Sydney’s Macquarie street with one of the largest non-union demonstrations ever seen. Keating blamed losing the election on Carr’s folly.

Embittered, Keating resigned from parliament, supplementing the opulence of being a former prime minister by accepting appointment as chairman of the Chinese government-owned China Development Bank’s key international advisory board.

In a recent National Press Club appearance, where he offered insults to journalists and others interrupted by chanting his trademark fillers, “you know” and “I mean”, he again condemned AUKUS, weakly dismissing criticisms of the communists’ massive human rights violations, including enslavement and the live organ trade, with the fiction that there are “disputes about what the nature of the Chinese affront to the Uighurs” is.

BEST

Keating concluded a lecture at Latrobe University in 2017 by observing that this brutal Beijing communist dictatorship is the “best government in the world in the last thirty years”.

So is this his preferred model republic for Australia?

Knowing Australians would overwhelmingly say no to that, he still wants Australians, descendants of the Anzacs, to behave, as the communists already believe we should, as the craven subjects of an obedient tributary State instead of the proud people we are.

While they would not agree with his language and behaviour, Keating’s desire for such a national suicide is fully shared by far too many of Australia’s sell-out elites.

Unsurprisingly, most politicians are determined, under the guise of a “climate emergency” they surely know does not exist, to turn us into a third world country with a grotesquely expensive and unreliable energy system, with little industry, with mining and agriculture run down, and with an education system with drastically falling standards, with Beijing the major beneficiary.

As to AUKUS, Keating is right in that it ties us more to the United States than ever before and revives British influence.

And a good thing too. Since white settlement it has been our destiny to be part of an empire, first the British and then the American – fortunately the two most benign and most civilised in history,

Labor makes much of John Curtin spelling this out, something which annoyed FDR. Our accession to the US sphere of influence was obvious even at Federation, with Prime Minister Alfred Deakin inviting President Theodore Roosevelt to send the Great White Fleet on a visit to Australia to counter growing Japanese influence.

The 1908 visit was such an enormous success that Deakin asked London to invite the US to extend the Monroe Doctrine to the Pacific, putting Australia effectively under US protection. The British refused.

Apart from Woodrow Wilson disastrously redrawing the map of Europe after the first world war, the Americans were reluctant to assume the imperial power which necessarily flows from economic dominance.

LEADERSHIP

This changed with Imperial Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour, forcing the Americans out of isolation to assume the mantle of world leadership.

Britain, Australia and those aspiring for freedom everywhere, breathed a huge sigh of relief.

AUKUS, much more than Anzus, satisfies Deakin’s dream. While we decide on war or peace, sensibly and indeed morally, our place is beside America and with Britain.

We do not know when and if war will come. There is a particular danger even before British and American nuclear submarines are based in WA.