Won't anybody play with us?

Me thinks we've just stolen their dodgeball too many times....

Australia's ex-opposition leader Mark Latham wants his country to scrap its alliance with the US as the link represents "the last manifestation of the White Australia mentality," according to excerpts from his diaries published yesterday.

Latham, who insisted he supported the US alliance in the lead up to his crushing defeat in last October's election, offered a scathing assessment of the pact in diary entries published in the Weekend Australian newspaper.

"It's just another form of neo-colonialism," the former leader of the center-left Labor Party said, claiming the alliance had unnecessarily dragged Australia into wars in Vietnam and Iraq.

'A timid, insular nation'

Latham said the US alliance was hindering Australia's integration into Asia and represented a security blanket for "a timid insular nation at the bottom of the world, too frightened to embrace an independent foreign policy."