Paul Keating — the age of impermanence

Paul Keating opened his April 21 speech to a crowd of 600 students with a joke the crowd seemed to miss. He talked about old Prime Ministers being taken off the bookshelf as a “musty old edition” that gets an airing every now and then – hey, he even joked that his own book was booby trapped.

The speech went on to outline Keating’s insights about the future, including:today’s students will grow up in the ‘age of impermanence’ and work in a ‘cloud economy’ rather than an industrialised economy

• politics has the capacity to define and channel a new age
• the diversity of the globe should be celebrated rather than feared, particularly as the power of “non-state actors” like Google, Facebook and Apple – and even the Islamic State and Al Qaeda – change the global balance of power
• economic power is shifting from the “static lumps” of the industrialised age to a new age where “economic units of transcontinental internationalism” will have more influence
• we must find a nuanced foreign policy that gives us security in Asia, rather than trying to find a “sole guarantor” to protect us in Asia
• open minds and strong leaders need to emerge, to make sense of the new world and leverage public life to make change

Labor Herald
Paul Keating: the age of impermanence

Paul Keating, former prime minister of Australia

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