[AAP, August 23, 2007]
The world has lacked an imaginative plan since the initiation of a united Europe, former prime minister Paul Keating says. The most noticeable failure was the US failure to pick up on the end of the Cold War, in the late 1980s, he said. Mr Keating told ABC TV he missed not being able to get things done since his government lost power in 1996, and lamented there had been no big ideas on the global scene. "The last big idea in the world was really (former French president Francois) Mitterrand and (former German chancellor Helmut) Kohl talking about a united Europe with a single currency and a constitution," he said. "Since that, what? The Russians, we had them – the epiphany at the end of the century, the Cold War, the wall coming down, but now we've lost it."
However, Russia's manoeuvrings were a concern, he said. "There they are putting their nuclear planes back on patrol. The US won the Cold War, cried victory and walked off the field. They walked off the field in 1992 and this is now 2007 – 15 years lost."
However Mr Keating also said that Labor team was back on the main game in the industrial relations (IR) debate. Mr Keating said Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd's party, including IR spokeswoman Julia Gillard, was now moving back towards building on the enterprise bargaining model he built as prime minister in the early 1990s. "I think, for my crowd, the penny's dropped for them," he said. "I notice (former ACTU secretary and Labor candidate) Greg Combet during the week, and Julia Gillard, saying the enterprise bargaining model of 1993 – that's the ones I introduced – are the core of our system. We're not going back to centralised wage fixing. That's really all I was asking ... that was the key point."
Mr Keating said that in 1993 he abolished centralised wage fixing after its 100 years in existence. "That is the primary change in industrial relations, not some rinky-dink thing like (the Coalition Government's) Work Choices," he said. "That's the thing that 90 per cent of the community now run on. Labor was not building on that strength. Instead they followed a red herring laid across the trail and they ran off having a debate about Work Choices. So they're now back on the main game, I'm pleased to say."
In an interview on ABC television in June, Mr Keating criticised Ms Gillard's understanding of IR principles such as enterprise bargaining. Asked in that interview how he thought Ms Gillard had performed, he said: "Not very well. Not very well. She hasn't got it all wrong but she doesn't quite understand, I don't think, the difference between the centralised system I inherited ... and the enterprise bargaining system of 1993, such a revolutionary change."
