Former Labor prime minister Paul Keating has launched a scathing attack on Tony Abbott accusing the opposition leader of being an "intellectual nobody" without policy ambition.
"If Tony Abbott ends up the prime minister of Australia, you've got to say God help us," he told ABC Radio on Tuesday.
Mr Keating described Mr Abbott as the "poor man's John Howard" who was regarded by many of his Liberal colleagues as their "resident nutter" when he arrived in federal parliament in 1994.
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"It was bad enough having the real John Howard ... at least Howard was a militant, aggressive conservative driving in reverse through the rear-vision mirror."
Mr Abbott was an "intellectual nobody and no policy ambition". On the other hand his predecessor Malcolm Turnbull had an articulated, intelligent, moderate, thought-out conservative position.
Mr Keating said the Rudd government deserved to be re-elected on its reaction to the global recession alone, saving Australia from an "economic holocaust" that had massively crunched the US and UK.
"You wouldn't trust this mob (the coalition) with a jam jar full of five-cent bits."
He described the opposition's finance spokesman Barnaby Joyce as a "junior Joh Bjelke-Petersen" who ran around making foolish economic pronouncements.
