Australian leader John Howard has been compared to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler by a former prime minister who attacked him as a dangerous nationalist and as anti-Muslim. Howard and Hitler both stressed populism and suspicion of other cultures, said Paul Keating, whose left-of-centre Labour government was ousted by Howard’s conservatives in 1996.
Keating, renowned for his savage insults of political opponents, made the point that he did not mean to “align” Howard with Hitler, saying that would be absurd.
But he portrayed the two men as nationalists rather than patriots in a speech at a Sydney Film School awards ceremony on Wednesday night.
“Nationalism is, I believe, a dangerous and divisive tendency. Its stock in trade is jingoism, populism and exclusion of the most calculating kind,” he said.
“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.
It shows “John Howard’s discomfort with Australia’s multicultural community and a disgust for the Islamic community.”
Howard’s government has taken a tough line on immigration to Australia, and the small Islamic community has been treated with some suspicion since the terror attacks on the United States and Britain.