CANBERRA - Former prime minister Paul Keating has again savaged the man who defeated him in the 1996 election, Prime Minister John Howard, by accusing him of being unpatriotic and anti-Muslim.
In an address to the Sydney film school festival last night, Mr Keating described Mr Howard as"a nationalist and not a patriot", and compared his politics to those of Adolf Hitler.
"A patriot will not exclude a person from another race from the community where they have lived side by side and whom he has known for many years but 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," Mr Keating said.
"Shades there of John Howard's discomfort with Australia's multicultural community and a disgust of the Islamic community."
Mr Keating said when the prime minister disparaged elites, he was disparaging cosmopolitan attitudes which proved his nationalism.
"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, for it's easy shorthand if nothing else."
This was not to say Mr Howard did not have "what we might call patriotic instincts".
"Of course he does, but they all come from his larger carpet bag of nationalism," Mr Keating said.
The former Labor leader, who is not averse to attacking his own side, last month launched a strong and amusing broadside against the current federal ALP leadership team.
However, last night's attack was a more personal and pointed broadside against Mr Howard.
"When John Howard famously advertised his wares in the 2004 election his advertisement said 'we decide who comes here and when they come'," he said.
"The we, of course, does not mention all of us but only some of us and the some of us are the people Howard believes are the keepers of the Holy Grail, the centuries of the gate of the true Australia, not the cosmopolitan one of the so called elites."
