A comparison of Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s nationalism to that of Nazism prompted outrage on Thursday, with one top minister calling the former leader who said it an ”unguided missile”.
Former Prime Minister Paul Keating, who led the country from 1991 until defeated by Howard in 1996, used a speech on Wednesday to accuse Howard of being a Nazi-like nationalist rather than a patriot for disparaging multiculturalism and so-called ”elites”.
”In Hitler’s day the term ”elite” had not yet arrived. If it had, the nationalist in him would have compelled him to use it,” Keating told a festival at the Sydney Film School.
”A nationalist will always remain suspicious of someone who does not seem to belong to his kind of people or more likely his kind of thinking.
”Shades there of John Howard’s discomfort with Australia’s multicultural community and a disgust of the Islamic community.”
The animosity between Howard and Keating, once dubbed the ”Lizard of Oz” by British newspapers for appearing to manhandle the Queen, is legendary in Australia. Howard has led the country for 11 years and through four election wins.
Howard, lagging in polls ahead of a fifth election bid due later this year, said Keating ought to get on with life.
”I’m a nationalist, I’m a patriot, I’m a believer and I feel sorry for Mr Keating,” he told reporters.
But Keating’s message may further damage Howard with one of the country’s biggest newspapers on Thursday saying many marginal seats ringing Howard’s Sydney stronghold were under threat from the resurgent Labour opposition.
A poll this week found Howard’s conservative coalition government was well behind Labour, but Howard had closed to within a point of Labor leader Kevin Rudd as preferred prime minister.
Political analysts are divided as to whether the preferred leader number means anything. ”When it comes to voting people will vote on local members,” John Warhurst, a political scientist at the Australian National University said.
Keating, who championed multiculturalism, Asian engagement and economic reform, said Howard supporters were the ”keepers of the Holy Grail, the centuries of the gate of the true Australia, not the cosmopolitan one of the so called elites”.
Keating backers have accused Howard of seeking to undo the internationalist approach of his predecessor and falling back on traditional alliances with the United States and the United Kingdom.
Workplace Relations Minister Joe Hockey described Keating as an ”unguided missile”.
Keating last month attacked Rudd and his senior leaders as well, saying they lacked the courage to stand apart and unseat Howard. – Reuters