Malcolm Turnbull said accusations from Mr Keating that his commitment to an Australian republic had waned were “completely wrong”.
Mr Keating has criticised prime ministers since John Howard for failing to use their leadership position to move the nation towards a republic.
“A whole series of prime ministers have broken the nation’s heart on the republic,” Mr Keating said in an interview with The Australian newspaper.
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“I mean, how pathetic. No great state has ever had the monarch of another country as its head of state. Australia is a diminished country, diminished by its own hand, maintaining the monarchy and our reliance upon the sovereignty of Great Britain.”
Mr Turnbull declared himself an Australian republican and Elizabethan after meeting with Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace last July.
Mr Turnbull said during the Queen’s reign he would not be reviving his campaign for a republic, which he spearheaded during the failed 1999 referendum as co-founder of the Australian Republic Movement (ARM).
‘A chameleon act’
Former prime minister Paul Keating said that the position taken by Mr Turnbull is a “chameleon act”.
He rejected the approach outlined by Malcolm Turnbull for the public to instigate the move towards a republic through a “street by street” campaign, after the Queen’s reign.
He said without the leadership of the prime minister and governing party, the idea of an Australian republic would fail to become a reality.
“He has little or no policy ambition and commensurably little imagination, no system of prevailing beliefs,” he said.
