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So, former Australian PM Paul Keating is spread on the political rack simultaneous to his one-time nemesis, the conservative Alan Jones, being forcibly outed.

While Jones outer and ABC journalist Chris Masters - whose employer is charged with relentless left-liberal bias - defends his expose by calling alleged sexual inclination:

"the elephant in the room"

when one speaks of Jones.

Which may cause one to wonder whether Masters would be just as tough - or celebrated, or effective - at exposing pink elephants.


Whatever the confluence of surrounding ironies, the recent editorial in The Australian (Immigration advice ignored) puts a plausible boot into the legacy of Keating and his notorious band of political mates:

("Leaping" Leo McLeay and) Mr Keating ... used divisive multicultural politics for short-term political gain at a cost to the long-term health of the nation.

Today Australia is reaping the fruits of that electoral cynicism.

As sad as that conclusion is, there is a very fair case backing it up.

Apologists for Keating are now out in force proclaiming misconstrued notions of "multiculturalism" as the driver behind Keating's granting of citizenship to Lakemba Mosque's Sheik Hilali.

Common sense suggests that the editorial conclusion, however, appears to have it about right.

Venal political gain was more likely the real driver, with a wonky version of "multiculturalism" lending justification after the fact.

Keating's recalcitrance and contumacy in the face of recent questioning about the matter, of course , only supports such a conclusion.

Moreover, the sheik and his supporters appear to have been well aware of the corrupt dynamics involved. Any underlying Islamist cynicism towards Australia's secular democratic political system could only have been underlined.

20-odd years later, we see that El-Din Hilali seems only to have grown more adept at utilising said system to propagate unaltered extremism.

He now times a raging address to 500 people about 'Satanic' women's attire to coincide with both the end of Ramadan and the beginning of the Cronulla summer.

Now, just as he did 20 years ago, he panders towards, surrounds himself with and draws support from what we heve in recent years learned to call violent jihadist groups.

Whose proponents wail about their Australian rights to "free speech", while Hilali whitewashes all manner of incendiary anti-Western bigotry delivered in Arabic by claiming it is simply "misinterpreted" in English.

Way back in 1986, even after Hawke (Labor) government immigration minister Chris Hurford tried to have the very same cleric deported from Australia for allegedly saying things like:

"(T)he two cheapest things in Australia are the flesh of a woman and the meat of a pig",

legend has it that Keating and McLeay, later to be, respectively, Prime Minister and Speaker of the House of Representatives "went in to bat for the sheik".

Few on the political scene at that time would deny that.

History shows that by 1987 the Hawke government, after a protracted legal battle, rescinded its original decision to deport Hilali.

Writing in 1988, Sydney Morning Herald religious affairs correspondent Alan Gill mentioned "claims" - widely known even then - that the Hawke government's change of heart on Hilali

"resulted from pressure from Labor MPs in marginal Sydney seats".

The MPs Gill refers to are of course Keating and McLeay.

He further says that a party thrown by AFIC (the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils) for Hawke three days before the 1987 Federal election - and attended by the entire ALP leadership, state and federal, as well as Gough Whitlam - was a "thank you" for saving Hilali(!)

As The Australian editorial notes about Keating and Leaping:

The two (politicians) held the neighbouring (Sydney electoral) seats of Blaxland and Grayndler, both heavily populated with Lebanese Muslims ... Neither wanted to risk alienating that community

Grayndler, McLeay's old electorate, incorporates Lakemba and its mosque. Hilali - now Mufti of Australia - is and was the imam of that mosque.

However, above and beyond accusing Keating and McLeay of merely shielding the Lakemba imam from deportation - misjudgement enough, in hindsight - the editorial makes this stunning claim:

Mr Keating engineered the elevation of Sheik Hilali to the leadership of the Muslim community to ensure Labor would have a leader it could deal with.

Confronted with this idea one can all but see old Cliche Keating's famous realpolitic-driven mindset ticking over:

'Better the devil you know', he might have said. Or more likely: 'A bastard, yes, but our bastard'.

Yet his response today to reporters' questions about it today was an equally glib, but - much, much - less satisfactorily explanatory:

"Nick off".

Which might be a fine response in the face of base conjecture, but that isn't the case here.

Some of the mechanics of the alleged Keating intervention are described in the editorial thus:

(W)hen he was acting prime minister while Bob Hawke was away in 1990, Mr Keating personally approved Sheik Hilali's residency. Chris Hurford was moved from his portfolio of immigration, and Bill McKinnon, who headed the department at the time, lost his job.

Only someone with power and motive somewhere near the par with Keating's could conceivably have engineered this three-pronged attack, whosever Hand may have executed each deed, and whosoever may have been responsible for frogmarching the succession of senior immigration department bureaucrats from the period on record as wanting to depopulate chez Hilali.

Moreover, it is now coming out that disturbing little stopovers on Hilali's life voyage towards and while in Australia were known at the time:

- His training in Gadaffi's Libya; his affiliation with not only with the Egypt's Islamo-fascist Muslim Brothers, but reputedly with the "Soldiers of Allah" faction within it that is charged with the assassination of Anwar Sadat;

- According to Hurford, by 1985 Hilali already:

"had a lengthy history of inflaming divisions in his community."

Which was why, as minister, he decided "not to approve Hilali's application for permanent residence or to renew his temporary visa."

Keating knew all this, and also knew that the 1988 video of Hilali ranting at Sydney University about:

Jews control(ling) the world ... through sex and sexual perversion (sic)

and whatnot was obtained and handed over by a Muslim community group opposed to Hilali.

That is: the inflamed community divisions Hurford was already aware of were on display yet again. Keating, however, decided to ignore the conflagration - and the following year Hilali was annointed the first "Mufti of Australia".

Not only did an apparent extremist use negative media attention to extract political gain, but he appeared to do so with the blessing of key supporters within the federal Labor government.