Love him or hate him, he’s still Paul Keating. Like most politicians, the former prime minister can’t see his own flaws or admit his own failures – but he got one thing right in this interview in the Fairfax broadsheets over the weekend.

And Peter Costello had failed to meet the challenges he had set himself: “[When] the treasurer took office he said he was going to deal with two problems – our foreign debt and the top marginal rate of tax. The foreign debt has doubled, and the top marginal rate of tax is still at 47%, where I took it in 1989 from John Howard’s 60%.”