Former prime minister and treasurer Paul Keating has used his 80th birthday to urge Australians and their political leaders to break out of a “timidity” in the nation’s intellectual structure, its economic and business aspirations, its constitutional links with Britain, its security dependence on the United States and its failure to reconcile with its original inhabitants.
“There is no premium on self-capacity, self-assurance, or belief in our ability to divine our own way forward,” he says.
“Our circumstance is a sad indictment of our lack of pride and wilful incapacity to do anything material to head down a new pathway.”
“It’s always been timid, you know,” Keating says of Australia. “We’re always trying to handhold a strategic guarantor when we could do these things ourselves. There’s not enough confidence in who we are and what we’ve achieved, kind of everywhere ….
“We have a sophisticated services market, we have mountains of iron ore … we’ve got the fourth-biggest pool of savings in the world, we’ve killed a structural current account deficit, and we’ve got sunlight and sunshine every day of the week.
“So we should be killing it. Instead of that we’re all the time timid, the whole thing is timid and there’s no what I call successful thinking … this timidity sort of seeps, it’s like a perspiration in the country.”
https://www.copyright link/politics/federal/it-s-time-for-australia-to-break-out-of-its-timidity-keating-20240219-p5f66h
