"The blight of Pauline Hanson is that her dumb bigotry offers a fantasy."

Former Aus PM Paul Keating -- aka the Lizard of Oz -- has deservedly unloaded on the pathetic race-baiting of newish Aus Liberal Party leader Angus Taylor.  "Many people, me included, wished him well in fighting One Nation with a conservatism anchored in principles. How dispiriting is his cowardice."

The Liberal party, battling an extreme version of itself – One Nation – has again fallen back to its default political policy: racism.

Angus Taylor, announcing a policy at primary odds with an immigrant nation, says a Liberal government under his leadership will adopt Trump ICE-style policies to weed and “boot out” people who fail to adhere to “national values” and who are responsible for the erosion of national culture including the Balkanisation of communities.

And, to hammer the point, sitting beside Taylor at his policy launch was Mr Racial Opportunism himself, John Winston Howard, late of anti-Asian migration in 1988 – the picket fence suburban racism of his first round as Liberal leader, and the wilful anti-humanitarianism of his electorally-driven Tampa atrocity of 2001. ...

Angus Taylor came to the Liberal leadership with a reputation of being mainstream Liberal; that is, a keeper of the Liberal party’s best longer-term instincts both in social and economic policy.

And many people, myself included, wished him well in consolidating the Liberal base and in fighting One Nation with a conservatism anchored in principles. If not righteous, decent.

But by adopting racism with its shabby appeal to differentiation and primal instincts, Angus Taylor marks himself out as a political leader unworthy of the leadership of a party that has managed Australia for the greater part of the last century and which celebrated the country’s unifying values.

Racism is not simply immoral and abhorrent, it is absurd. The notion that some of us are in some way different to the rest of us – in some way born differently, of some alien biology. ...

The blight of Pauline Hanson is that her dumb bigotry offers a fantasy. The fantasy that Australia in the modern age can return to a monoculture. A monoculture which fails to acknowledge or accept that a continent of our scale is able to turn its back on the multilateralism of neighbouring states or on the vitality of their societies. And, more than that, shun them while disparaging any contribution they may make or bring to us as migrants.

How dispiriting for the rest of us is Angus Taylor’s cowardice in not even attempting to stand and argue for principles that have been integral to Australia’s strength – principles his party has long championed.

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