Passing almost unnoticed this week, given all the attention on the Liberal circus, was Anthony Albanese signing a Treaty on Common Security with Indonesia’s President Prabowo Subianto — the second significant security agreement with Indonesia in just over a year.
The new agreement is — very openly — closely modelled on the first, historic treaty in 1995 between Paul Keating and Indonesia’s former president Suharto. There is, it seems, at least one area of foreign and security policy where Keating is not being studiously ignored, as he is on Albanese’s pathological determination to further enmesh Australia in the US military apparatus against China.