War with China in three years? Paul Keating unleashes on Nine’s ‘Red Alert’ hysteria

 War with China in three years? Paul Keating unleashes on Nine’s ‘Red Alert’ hysteria

(Paul Keating and Crikey)

In March 2023, Nine newspapers unleashed an extraordinary series warning of war with China within three years and our unpreparedness for it. On the third anniversary, former prime minister Paul Keating has made some trenchant observations about it.

(Nine newspapers, under the bylines of Peter Hartcher and Matthew Knott, published on March 7, 2023, an extraordinary series called “Red Alert”, which claimed that Australia needed to be ready for a military conflict with China within three years. Relying on the opinions of anti-China hawks, the series led with accusations that the government was not being honest with Australians and Australia was not prepared to fight a full-scale military conflict against China.

At the time, former prime minister Paul Keating lashed the series as “the most egregious and provocative news presentation of any newspaper I have witnessed in over 50 years of active public life … way worse than the illustrated sampans shown to be coming from China in the buildup to the war in Vietnam in the 1960s.”

With tomorrow the date for Nine’s anticipated war with China and no conflict in sight, Paul Keating tells Crikey his reflections on the series and the damage done to Nine newspapers’ credibility.)

Three years ago tomorrow, the editorial leadership of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age wilfully and dangerously misled the communities of Sydney and Melbourne into believing that at or by tomorrow, March 7, 2026, Australia would face the prospect of a direct attack by China and its military on the mainland of Australia.

Tomorrow, three years will have elapsed since that irresponsible prediction, for neither city has been attacked by China — as the authors of that extravagant untruth knew at the time of the claim.

The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age‘s “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.

Newspapers of supposed record take, for the most part, a century to establish their bona fides as both a reputable and reliable source of information for the communities they serve. But having established a reputation for reliability and believability, the same newspapers then carry a concomitant responsibility to maintain the same reliability and communal trust that their otherwise long fidelity to truth had engendered.

But this is not what the editorial leadership of the Herald and the Age did on March 7, 2023.

The Herald editor at the time, Bevan Shields, authorised its international editor Peter 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 50 years of active public life.

The accomplices in this sham exercise were none other than a writhing bunch of formerly well-identified China critics. Their conclusion in the story was that “Australia faces the prospect of war with China within three years, and our defence force is unprepared” — that “the overwhelming source of danger to Australia is from China”.

None of the claims have materialised.

The so-called Red Alert “panellists” went on to say that “the recent decades of tranquillity were not the norm in human affairs but an aberration” and that “Australia’s holiday from history is over”.

In fact, in the period since the series appeared, it has been the United States, not China, that has 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.

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?

I am hoping that the new editor of the SMH may decide that amoral standards of journalism have no place in a paper that, these days, apart from the need of truth and accuracy, is struggling to keep its head above the rising tide of instant news and boundless self-expression.