Paul Keating - After Politics

After Politics

Since leaving parliament, Keating has been a director of various companies, and an adviser to Lazard, an investment banking firm.

In 1997 Keating declined appointment as a Companion of the Order of Australia, which has been offered to all exiting prime ministers since the present Australian Honours System was introduced in 1975.

In 2000, he published a book, Engagement: Australia Faces the Asia-Pacific, which focused on foreign policy during his term as prime minister.

In 2002, Keating's former speechwriter and adviser, Don Watson, published Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: A Portrait of Paul Keating PM. The book first drew criticism from Keating's estranged wife, Annita Keating, who said that it understated her contribution, a complaint Watson rejected. Keating himself was so unhappy with the book that it brought the two men's friendship to an end. Their antagonism has crystallised, in part, around the authorship of the Redfern Speech, which Watson claimed for himself in Recollections of a Bleeding Heart and elsewhere, crediting Keating only with reading his text unchanged. Keating has disputed this account.

During Howard's prime ministership, Keating made occasional speeches strongly criticising his successor's social policies, and defending his own policies, such as those on East Timor. Keating described Howard as a "desiccated coconut" who was "Araldited to the seat" and that "Howard ... is an old antediluvian 19th century person who wanted to stomp forever ... on ordinary people's rights to organise themselves at work ... he's a pre-Copernican obscurantist", when criticising the Howard government's WorkChoices policy. He described Howard's deputy, Peter Costello, as being "all tip and no iceberg" when referring to a pact made by Howard to hand the prime ministership over to Costello after two terms. On Labor's victory at the 2007 election, Keating said that he was relieved, rather than happy, that the Howard government had been removed. He claimed that there was "Relief that the nation had put itself back on course. Relief that the toxicity of the Liberal social agenda – the active disparagement of particular classes and groups, that feeling of alienation in your own country – was over."

In May 2007, Keating suggested that Sydney, rather than Canberra, should be the capital of Australia, saying that:

John Howard has already effectively moved the Parliament here. Cabinet meets in Philip Street in Sydney, and when they do go to Canberra, they fly down to the bush capital, and everybody flies out on Friday. There is an air of unreality about Canberra. If Parliament sat in Sydney, they would have a better understanding of the problems being faced by their constituents. These real things are camouflaged from Canberra.

Keating was critical of the then opposition leader (and later prime minister) Kevin Rudd's leadership team. For example, before the 2007 federal election, which Labor won, he criticised the then opposition industrial relations spokesperson Julia Gillard, saying she lacked an understanding of principles such as enterprise-bargaining set under his government in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He also attacked Rudd's chief of staff David Epstein and Gary Gray, who was at that time a candidate for Kim Beazley's seat of Brand, to which he was elected in 2007.

In February 2008, Keating joined former prime ministers Whitlam, Fraser and Hawke in Parliament House, Canberra, to witness the parliamentary apology to the Stolen Generations.

In August 2008, he spoke at the book launch of Unfinished Business: Paul Keating's Interrupted Revolution, authored by economist David Love. Among the topics discussed during the launch were the need to increase compulsory superannuation contributions, as well as to restore incentives (removed under Howard/Costello) for people to receive their superannuation payments in annuities.

Keating is currently a Visiting Professor of Public Policy at the University of New South Wales. He has been awarded honorary doctorates in law from Keio University in Tokyo, the National University of Singapore, and the University of New South Wales