Paul Keating says he is fortunate that he left school at 14 and didn’t attend university because doing so would have inhibited the sense of inquiry that allowed him to imagine how the Australian economy could be completely reformed.
In his late teens, he regularly visited Jack Lang, the former firebrand NSW Labor premier who then was in his 80s. When Keating was approaching 18 and considering an electrical engineering course, Lang told him: “Mr Keating, what you need to learn you can’t find in any university. You have too much to learn to wait half a dozen years specialising.”“So what I needed to do was observe the world and learn a bit about everything, rather than a lot about one thing,” Keating now observes.
In “the adventure department” were Britain’s World War II prime minister Churchill and the wartime American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Churchill was “an old conservative imperialist” but he had moral clarity, the power of words and enormous inquiry.Keating spent lunchtimes at Berkelouw bookshop in King Street and in the Sydney Council library in the Queen Elizabeth building.
Keating says being raised in a Catholic family and attending a Catholic school drilled into him a sense of compassion and of doing good. It also took in the political and philosophical revolutions of the 18th century, specifically by the American revolution of 1776 and Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, which influenced the French Revolution of 1789.Philosophers such as Locke, Hume and Rousseau argued that authority came from the people, not from some monarch supposedly representing God.
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