Paul Bongiorno

Every populist, racist button that could be pushed was pushed by Angus Taylor in a way that some of the Liberal backbench said to me went further than Susan Lee would even have gone, and she was beginning to skate quite close to the wind there.

And it's all in the context of the fact that the Liberal Party in the upcoming Faribar election in a few weeks' time...

are running third.

One Nation and an independent candidate are vying to win that by-election, and the Liberals are desperate to claw back as much support from people who have decided to abandon the coalition or the Liberals for One Nation.

In other words, Taylor is trying to outdo Pauline Hanson, and there's plenty of evidence in state and federal elections past that that won't work.

Exactly.

Well, Angus Taylor even came to paraphrasing a famous battle cry of John Howard in the 2001 election.

Now, Taylor made a big thing of saying that his immigration policy is Australian values placed, but it seems that Taylor is prepared to dump the humanitarian values that underpin the UN conventions that he here is blithely promising to discard.

Well, Keating was appalled enough to release a withering statement against the Taylor immigration policy prescriptions.

He likens them to Donald Trump's crackdown in the United States, the vetting of people's social media at the border, the threat to kick people out who don't somehow measure up to the Australian values statement.

Keating says Taylor, for base political reasons, and this is an interesting tack from the former Labor Prime Minister.

He says, for base political reasons, Taylor has elected to walk away from the best instincts of the Liberal Party.

The party of Robert Menzies, of Harold Holt, of Malcolm Fraser, Andrew Peacock, Brendan Nelson and Malcolm Turnbull.

All of these leaders played a part in opening Australia's borders to refugees, Fraser famously with the Vietnamese.

Holt began the dismantling of the white Australia policy.

Keating said that 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.

He says racism is not simply immoral and abhorrent, it is absurd.

As if somehow a person's race makes one person more worthy, more human than another.

Keating says 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.