In a speech delivered last night for the 50th anniversary of the conservative magazine Quadrant, Mr Howard said the left had a history of denigrating the nation and was now doing the same with the war in Iraq, describing Islamic terrorism as the new tyranny.

He said Australian universities were still breeding leftists and described pro-communists of decades past as “ideological barrackers for regimes of oppression opposed to Australia and its interests”, Fairfax reports today.

Mr Howard said the left was wrong in its view that the Cold War was an equal struggle between the ideologies of the United States and the Soviet Union.

“It became the height of intellectual sophistication to believe that people in the West were no less oppressed than people under the yoke of communist dictatorship,” Mr Howard said in his speech.

Mr Howard praised Quadrant for its record of countering “stultifying orthodoxies and dangerous utopias that have, at times, gripped the Western intelligentsia”.