PAUL Keating has launched a vicious attack on the late journalist Paddy McGuinness, branding him a liar and a fraud with more "political, philosophic and economic positions than would have the Kama Sutra had it been a philosophic text".
On the eve of the journalist’s funeral, which will be held tomorrow at the Rookwood Cemetery in Sydney, the former prime minister has unloaded on the celebrated writer’s image as an agent provocateur.
“He was none of those things. He was a fraud. But let me calibrate that. He was not just a fraud, he was a liar and a fraud,’’ Mr Keating writes today in the Australian Financial Review.
“In a long public life I have made it a rule never to speak ill of the dead; to not criticise someone who can no longer respond to the criticism.
“I am going to break that rule in the case of Paddy McGuinness.’’
Mr Keating defends his attack on the late McGuinness on the grounds he had “heaped more vitriol and on me than anyone in public life” and endlessly put up with his “unreasonable and unceasing tirades.”
The former Prime MInister said “when push came to shove, McGuinness’s journalism did not add up to a row of beans.”
“He held more political, philosophic and economic positions than would have the Karma Sutra had it been a philosophic text,’’ Mr Keating writes.
“This was not because he possessed some fine mind which led him to change positions: it was nothing of the sort. It was a prejudiced, capricious and intellectually corrupt mind that was all over the shop depending on what suited his miserable purposes at the time.’’
Mr Keating complains that McGuiness failed to concede the success of the Hawke-Keating government in deregulating the banking system and reforming superannuation or the decision to stick with tariff changes despite a recession.
“You would think that an honest observer, who had proselytised against tariffs for years, would give a conscientious government marks for seeing that vast protectionism done in,’’ he writes.
“But not McGuinness. By that stage, like a drunken skater, he had slid across the rink to the neo-conservative Right, fulminating for all his worth against the so-called "elites".
“Not the elite of a government with control of both houses of parliament with a dogmatic prime minister and a decade of office behind it; or the elite of that group of journalists which formed Howard’s praetorian guard – the Shanahans, the Albrechtsens, the Milnes,’’ he said.
In conclusion, Mr Keating writes: “McGuinness was a shocker. In journalistic terms, he had the morals of an alley cat.”
“The quality of the Australian press will rise simply because his vituperation and contumely will have been excised from it. ‘’