The revenge of Mark Latham

The Latham Diaries
Mark Latham
Melbourne University Press, 2005

Mark Latham was a young idealistic figure when he joined the Australian Labour Party in 1979; within a decade he had become a Mayor of the Sydney suburb of Liverpool. In 1994, he became a federal MP, and in 2004 as leader of the Australian Labor Party, he lead the party to defeat in an Australian federal election. In January 2005, he retired from public life, and late last month, his ‘diaries’ were published.

The dairies are almost wholly political, covering his political career from his entry to Federal Parliament, although the published portions of the diary deal mostly with the period when Latham was a major figure in Australian public life, from 2002 to early 2005. One has to wonder at the exact veracity of the material published; as Latham’s career grows and he climbs the ‘greasy pole’, he becomes more and more assidious in keeping his journal. In addition, the diaries deal almost wholly with matters within his own party; of events pertaining to the government he is trying to defeat, Latham has nothing to say; events outside political life have no place whatsover in this book. One suspects these are as much memoirs as diaries, although at any rate we can accept this book as the author’s account of the events he describes.

The diaries reveal a man whose worldview is rather unusual. Latham has no time for the old socialist homilies. He’s opposed to the rent-seeking elements that live in harmony with the Australian Labor Party, and instead chose to identify himself with the ‘aspirational’ voters, ambitious working-class people who have done well for themselves. A perceptive friend remarked to me that “Australia is the place where the English and Irish lower classes went and found paradise”. That is as good a description of the country as any; and these people and their descendants have no time for socialist daydreamers, but they do have a healthy appetite for government services paid for by someone else. Latham looked to make himself the champion of these people.

Latham is, to say the least, a mercurial personality. While he was a smart enough guy, compared to his colleagues, he was a divided soul. While his head was forward looking, trying his hand at the eternal social-democratic dream of ‘reinventing government’, and placing great stress in dispersing power away from government and corporate elites, Latham had the heart and soul of an old fashioned class warrior. He always calls his Liberal opponents ‘Tories’ and hates them; he displays a fair degree of disdain for anyone that is not of his cultural and political type. A rare day at the cricket reveals the truth of the man- he’s a working class yobbo, happiest on the Hill with his rugby-league mates.

To sum up the actual contents, it is basically an account of how Latham’s pure policy driven agenda is constantly thwarted by the ‘Old-Guard’ of the ALP, and the terrible tactics that they, and their mates in the media, employ against him. Despite all this, after many battles, Latham becomes leader, despite many misgivings on the part of his colleagues. At first, all goes well; Latham certainly is different to the regular run of the mill politician, and he has long serving Prime Minister John Howard caught on the hop. But as time goes by, doubts start to emerge about Latham, his character, policies, and his lack of drive for the job. A nasty ex-wife emerges from the past, allegations of sexual misconduct and a mysterious ‘videotape’ emerge, and Latham loses his way. He leads the party to defeat in the election, amid private health worries, and then all hell breaks loose as his internal party enemies plot against him, aided by the media. Latham, sick, disenchanted, decides that the game is not worth the candle, picks up his bat and ball, and goes home.

Any work of an autobiographical nature is revealing, because it is a written self-portrait. It is often amazing the gap between how we see ourselves and how others see us. The first thing that should be said is that Latham is a guy that is deeply devoted to his family. Apart from that, it is not clear what is true or false about this guy. Certainly few people have ever been less charitable about others. He revels in an entry running down a rival, or making a joke at someone else’s expense.

Of course, Latham is writing about his party colleagues, and from what can be discerned from other sources, it is quite possible that when Latham describes them as backstabbing, anti-intellectual corrupt cowards, he is stating nothing more then the truth. The ruthless, machine-style nature of Australian Labor Party internal politics has been obvious to the general public for fifty years or more.

So one is obliged to ask how a man could rise to the top of this party after less then ten years in the Federal Parliament. A rise that rapid seems rather unlikely by itself; that such a rapid rise could occur with the man in question having squeaky-clean hands himself seems impossible to credit. But the diaries have no ‘confessions’ of any great intrigues by Latham, only against him.

It must be said that part of Latham’s rapid rise was that he was a talented politician in a deeply untalented party. Latham clearly did care deeply about policy solutions to the problems of people; the diaries themselves suggest that most of his colleagues could not look past their own entitlements as MPs. As a candidate for the office of Prime Minister, though, Latham is caught out by the narrowness of his vision; for Latham, local issues are everything, his policy concerns are about community, society and better services. To be fair, he knows the importance of fiscal discipline, and I personally enjoyed his derision of his left-wing colleagues the most in this book. But on foreign policy and security he’s a non-starter; Bush is a greater menace to Australians then terrorists, people that join the defence forces are dismissed as ‘meatheads’ with attitude problems. There has been a general consensus that ‘Australia dodged a bullet’ when Latham missed out on being Prime Minister; after reading these diaries I agree with this more then ever.

Since the diaries were released, Latham has come in for intense ridicule from the media and his political enemies, which is to say, nearly everyone in Australian public life. This is not surprising; Latham has tipped a bucket of manure over nearly everyone. His predecessor and successor as ALP leader, Kim Beazley, comes out worse, and to be honest Latham does raise some good questions about him. The media come off just as bad. For example, Deborah Snow is depicted as ‘The Abominable Snow woman’ (Latham has a bad habit of nicknaming everyone) mostly for this feature. Reading about the intensity of the coverage he faces, I found it possible to feel sympathy for Latham, who is mostly worried about protecting his family. And Australian journalists certainly do deserve a bucketing.

Despite the ridicule Latham has received in turn, some of it deserved, the book is selling like hot cakes. And deservedly so, because Latham’s style is entertaining. It is certainly revealing enough about the chronic dysfunction in the Australian Labor Party, and Latham himself is pessimistic about it. There are the usual warts one must expect of a polemic volume that is a self-justifying political figure. With that health warning in mind, for serious students of Australian politics, or social-democratic parties, or political junkies of any sort, this book is a fine read.