And AN, I agree that true neocons in Australia are rare, but hangers on of the now passing Bushite Howard ascendancy filled some of the same roles, and in some ways were neocons manque.

Interesting that Hayden and PPMcG both had the same path of apostasy (that’s the kinder term) from the left. Hayden really seems to have turned into a poor man’s Sir John Kerr on that front. Becoming G-G did for him, I fear. I wonder if it was sycophancy from “Sir” Sir David Smith that did it?

Communists, red sympathisers and their families are being massacred by the thousands. Backlands army units are reported to have executed thousands of communists after interrogation in remote jails. Armed with wide-bladed knives called parangs, Moslem bands crept at night into the homes of communists, killing entire families and burying their bodies in shallow graves. The murder campaign became so brazen in parts of rural East Java, that Moslem bands placed the heads of victims on poles and paraded them through villages. The killings have been on such a scale that the disposal of the corpses has created a serious sanitation problem in East Java and Northern Sumatra where the humid air bears the reek of decaying flesh. Travellers from those areas tell of small rivers and streams that have been literally clogged with bodies.

—Time Magazine, December 1965

But in Keating’s diseased mind, Paddy’s criticism, or anyone else’s, was a far greater crime than a million murders.

Iraq was invaded because the American leadership (wrongly, as it turned out) believed that this would serve US national interests. It is the same basic reason that invasions have occurred for thousands of years, and will in all likelihood occur for thousands of years more.

So you made a specific claim that the previous government’s actions were inspired by a particular ideology. I think this is plainly false. The previous government had no neocons, and even if they did outsourcing refugee detention to a country that was willng to do it (and is now complaining that we are stopping) had nothing to do with it.

If you want to argue that the previous government was essentially driven by traditional foreign policy realism I will agree with you.

The migration racket could have been shut down without bullying Nauru, a bankrupt state that is entirely dependent on our good graces for its survival, and so open to be pushed around, even by the likes of Alexander Downer.

And, really, are you so naive as to believe that the neo con agenda was really about spreading democracy around the world? It was about the projection of American power. The stuff about democracy was a pretext, to distinguish it from the Kissinger realist school of American foreign policy power, which did not bother with pretexts.

And what does shutting down a migration racket operating via refugee law have to do with spreading democracy around the world?

Paddy never liked Keating from the time Keating knew more on a subject Paddy should have been an expert on and showed him up terribly.

Paddy couldn’t get over the fact a person who never even got the HSC was not only more knowledgable but understood the subject better than he a person of honours and masters degree background.

It got ridiculous at one stage when at some pub in Balmain he became totaly inarticulate about why Keating was one of the worst PMs ever.

As more and more people heckled about labour marker deregulation, competition policy etc Paddy got redder and redder. I thought he would burst.

it is ironic he was friends with Hayden yet the man who he might have enjoyed an intellectual conversation with he hated with a vehemance.

I’m not so sure. The leitmotif of the American neo cons is an aggressive insistence that the United States to throw its weight about, when and where they feel like it. Obviously, Australia’s capacity to do this is much more limited. But the Howard government certainly did it on occasion, most notably bullying the government of Nauru into taking our refugees, intervening in the Solomons, and so on. All of this occurred after the neo cons had taken power in the US and had showed them how to do it.

Back to McGuinness, the point still stands. Substitute “tories” for “neo cons” if you must.