abc.net.au
This dropped a few days ago: the head of ASIS (Australia's version of MI6 and the CIA) gave an interview. It's 26 minutes with no speedup option, so while most of it's pretty interesting I'll give some timestamps for things that are relevant to the broader geopolitical situation and thus might be the most interesting for non-Australians (as opposed to "how does ASIS work" and "reflection on specific past incidents"): 5:00-7:00, 9:17-11:17, 21:59-25:29 and to some extent 16:25-18:19.
Thought this might be of interest to you guys; also interested in what others think he meant with the various vague allusions, since I have my own ideas but I could be projecting my prejudices.
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Notes -
WRT Paul Keating, he's one of the old guard of 90s-00s China analysts whose model of China is still Deng's "hide your strength and bide your time" and haven't got it through their heads that Xi is starting to move to the next phase of capitalising on that and throwing China's weight around. There are a bunch of other old China analysts who think like Keating does; it's just that as an ex-PM who pursued a closer relationship with China, Keating still gets given a microphone while the rest get basically ignored.
WRT loyalty to the US side, I'd suggest reading the transcript I posted above. Personally I'd want us to follow the 'States if it came to war (even if that meant I or some of my relatives got killed), but it should be remembered that over 2% of our resident population in Australia was born in Mainland China and a decent chunk of them (particularly the younger, more recent immigrants and those who're here for university) are loyal to Beijing either via PRC indoctrination or "do what we want or your relatives back in China get punished" blackmail, creating a serious pro-PRC lobby*; there are also the standard "someone else do the dying pls" elements who urge neutrality (the Greens, for instance, want us to stay out to avoid dying, and they get 12% of the vote).
*Note that most of the Chinese-culture-and-community institutions in Australia have been quite thoroughly co-opted by Beijing as intelligence and influence networks. This means that if we were to go in with the USA in a war over Taiwan, we would have an organised resistance on our hands consisting of something like 0.5% of the resident population. I can't see too many viable solutions to that other than bulldozing those institutions and mass-interning a huge chunk of Chinese-Australians, and if we did that we'd have anti-racists screaming bloody murder (with, y'know, more than zero justification).
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