The Bankstown boy, the one who became Prime Minister of Australia?  Well let me tell you!

Do you want to know what happened when my old mate, the then Immigration Minister,  Nick Bolkus, suggested we meet the boss in his office back in 1992?  With the expletives removed (Geez he can swear) it went something like this...........

Keating the free-trader wasn't in battle mode when I met him that first time in the Oval Office.  He was polite and typically forthright, but he didn't ask me a single question.  He wasn't a bloke to ask questions.  It was as if everything worth knowing, the myths on the lap of Jack Lang, the economics from the pointy heads in Treasury, was already known, acquired along the way. 

`Arrogant bastard, but at least he doesn't put people down the way Hawke did.  Even Graeme Campbell, who hates Keating, is treated with respect in the Caucus,' my insider had explained.  

"All right, then I'll ask a few questions," I said to myself as I waited impatiently for the opening.  

"What about deregulating the banking sector and selling off public assets, isn't that part of the conservative agenda?" I asked.  

The moment the word `banking' was uttered Keating was away.  

"There was my father all prepared to invest in a Malaysian project and he's got this officious, small-minded bank manager who won't lend him the money," he said, the words passing through the lips as easily as the lyrics of a favourite song.  He's been here before, I thought.  

"My father would have been exporting to Asia if that suburban bank clerk hadn't been so powerful.  It was a joke, really.  That was old, regulated, inward-looking Australia.  That's why we deregulated the financial market and floated the dollar.  Allowing some halfwit bank manager to control the flow of money was fucking bullshit."  

"Is that the real reason why you deregulated the banking system?" I wanted to ask.  

"Competition is the way to force them to behave themselves," he said.  

By the time Keating's policies had reached fruition the Commonwealth Bank had gone private, the National Australia Bank was reporting a $1.97 billion profit, and small depositors were being driven out of savings banks in a manner which made Christ's performance in the temple pale into insignificance.

Keating, the smart alec disciple of modernity, was no radical.    

 As told in my book Cleary Independent published by HarperCollins in 1998.