Paul Keating has again accused the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age of misleading the public with their “irresponsible prediction” three years ago of a Chinese attack on Australia.
The former prime minister took the opportunity of the third anniversary of Nine newspapers’ Red Alert series to repeat his disdain for the reporting and its primary author, international editor Peter Hartcher.
On 7 March 2023, the SMH and the Age published an alarming front page warning about the threat of “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 is from China,” the report said. “The nature of the threat extends to the prospect of a full-scale war – and Australia would have to be involved.
“While the official Canberra guidance on timing is that Australia will have less than 10 years’ warning of war, the five experts think that 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 on Friday, on the eve of that three-year mark, Keating said: “None of the claims have materialised.”
Keating went on to label Hartcher “maladroit”, adding to the list of insults he threw at the journalist at the time of the original publication, which included “psychopath” and “old acid drop”.
Hartcher responded in part to the former prime minister’s criticism in an opinion piece in 2024, which argued Keating was “Australia’s foremost apologist for the Chinese Communist Party” and accused him of “bloody-mindedness in retirement” and an “autocratic tendency”.
The Red Alert series was widely criticised as hysterical and hyperbolic by others, including Paul Barry on Media Watch.
Margaret Simons, in a 2023 article for Guardian Australia, spoke to a range of foreign affairs specialists who described the series variously as “pretentious”, “irresponsible” and implicitly racist in its depictions of China.
Keating said then editor Bevan Shields allowed Hartcher “to concoct a China-threat story aided by a group of handpicked anti-China accomplices, to produce the most egregious and provocative news presentation I have witnessed in over fifty years of active public life”.
“The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age ‘Red Alert’ series, replete with lurid images of Chinese military aircraft descending upon Australia, represents one of the most shameful episodes in the history of Australian journalism,” his statement on Friday said.
Shields stepped down as SMH editor last year and was replaced by Jordan Baker, who Keating said he hoped “may decide that amoral standards of journalism have no place in a paper”.
Keating went on to say it was not China, but the United States, that had attacked other countries, “as last weekend’s premeditated attack on Iran attests”.
“Apart from a brief border conflict with Vietnam in 1979, China has not attacked any state in just on half a century,” he said.
“But notwithstanding this delinquent and wilful episode, Peter Hartcher to this day, remains the international editor of both papers. How maladroit do you have to be before the management decides your copy has no value – before management is obliged to drop you?”
Nine and Hartcher declined to comment.
