The Latham Diaries
By Mark Latham
Melbourne University Press, 2005
429 pages, $39.95 (hb)

REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON

No wonder federal ALP politicians are narked. Mark Latham, after eleven years in federal parliament (including a year as leader of the ALP before his resignation in 2005) has nailed his party colleagues’ true colours to the wall with bitter, but accurate, vitriol.

Latham’s diary about his party peers records a decade-long parade of “more careerists, more technocrats, more plodders”. Everywhere Latham turns, his colleagues are talking about “trips, travel allowance and other entitlements” — “milking the largesse of the parliamentary club for all it’s worth”. Labor parliamentarians are “cautious, predictable, bland”, and the blandest of them all is federal ALP leader Kim Beazley: the waffle-maker, supremely “uninteresting”, a “boredom machine”, a militarist who is as “socially conservative as Howard” and who has taken the ALP into “an intellectual black hole”.

The trade union officials in the ALP, observes Latham, are “not a voice for workers’ interests” but for their own job advancement in the party, more concerned with protecting the political orthodoxy of the “US Alliance”, for example, than opposing the Free Trade Agreement with the US (which is just a stance reserved “for the members worried about their jobs”, as the AWU’s boss told Latham).

Latham experiences “despair on all fronts” — party democracy, policy debates and social composition (no “knock-around types” like himself from the working-class seat of Werriwa in south-west Sydney). The “machine politics” of the factions (“Left”, Centre and Right) run on personal destruction and dirt campaigns instead of the contest of ideas, and operates as a “political mafia” full of favours, patronage and pay-back. The factions, like “cell division”, further subdivide into “personality-based feudal groupings”, squabbling and intriguing over shadow front-bench positions with an eye to future careers.

The ALP, concludes Latham early on, is a party “gutted of belief and purpose”, a far cry from the late 1970s when he entered politics with a belief in working-class values and when his Green Valley branch meetings “were full of committed trade unionists”. Now the roots of the ALP are rotten. Local branches are “rorted and empty”, stacked with hundreds of paper members bodgily enrolled for the advancement of factional warlords. Labor conferences and policy committees are “tightly stage-managed, devoid of creativity and genuine debate”.

This hollowed-out ALP, bereft of principle, is a “party that manages the existing order, instead of creating a new one”. The defining aspect of Labor’s time in opposition, says Latham, “has been its adoption of Coalition policy”, from the GST and the 30% private health insurance rebate, to the “stinking, rotten” war in Iraq.

ALP hypocrisy and ideological muddle fertilise the Australian electorate’s “distrustful, alienated, sceptical, disillusioned and cynical” view of parliamentary politics. The “war on terror”, for example, is seen by Latham (and much of the electorate) as “an alibi for a new round of expansionist and arrogant foreign policy” by Washington, but Simon Crean, when Labor leader, botched his appearance at the gigantic anti-war protests in February 2003.

After being warned off attending the Sydney protest by his minders because he would be up against the anti-war integrity and eloquence of John Pilger, Crean opts for Brisbane, only to stuff up big time by focussing on disarming Saddam Hussein of (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction instead of “denouncing Howard as a lying suckhole to the Americans” and “pledging his opposition to the barbarism of war”. So when almost a million marched against war and Howard, “the Leader of the Opposition gets booed off the stage in Brisbane”, writes a disgusted Latham.

Then, when Latham became ALP leader in 2003, and adopted a policy of “troops home by Christmas”, he catches out shadow foreign minister Kevin Rudd publicly undermining party policy — just one of dozens of the anonymous “senior ALP figures” who speak “off-the-record” to journalists with the aim of damaging the policies, and the leader, they disagree with.

However, as Latham might well sing in the fashion of the song by Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood, “and then I go and spoil it all by saying something stupid” like: enterprise bargaining, not pattern bargaining, is the great hope for workers; former ALP prime ministers Whitlam and Keating got it right by backing the Indonesian Generals and their genocidal invasion of East Timor; Australia needs mandatory detention of refugees; gay marriage should not be recognised; and “welfare reform” (“sanctions on loafers”) should have had an ALP, not a Howard brand.

Latham, happily describing himself as “intellectually off to the right” and an “economic rationalist”, emphasises how “fiscal responsibility is paramount”, agreeing with the decision to dump many ALP spending plans during the last election campaign. Despite giving the “arrogance and greed of corporate power” some stick, Latham, a member of the right faction, entertains no thought of slashing the capitalist welfare state (the huge pot of government subsidies and tax generosity for the business class) to fund ALP budget spending on people’s needs.

Neither, despite his belief that Labor “should be the anti-war party of Australian politics”, can Latham conceive of cutting deeply into war spending. Instead, Latham makes a symbolic rapprochement with the US imperialist representative in Australia, ambassador Tom Schieffer, at a press conference during the election campaign; makes Bomber Beazley shadow defence minister; waters down the “troops out” policy; and does “one of those terrible things you do in this job: glorifying war at a military parade in Townsville” (as if he had no choice).

Latham’s summary diagnosis of the ALP sickness — “the party has lost its identity”, beginning with the “economic liberalisation” of the Hawke/Keating years — is accurate (although it would be more accurate to say that the ALP has lost even its image as a party of the working class and of social justice, since the historical reality of ALP governments has always departed from the image). Latham’s new identity for the ALP, however, is a dud. The “ladder of opportunity” (the “aspirational” politics of the working-class climb into middle-class prosperity through “opportunity, responsibility and hard work”) failed to cut it with working-class voters (which Latham now admits), as did his vision of the “social capital” of “mutualism, community-building and the enlightenment of the individual”.

“People are now agents of their own economic future” through self-employment and share ownership, and no longer need trade unions, writes Latham through sociologically dubious eyes, but by writing off “bigness” as bad, including mass protests and trade unions, Latham disarms people of their strength in numbers against ruling-class power.

Latham reflects on the age-old choice between political change through parliament or through extra-parliamentary action. But whilst Latham ends up thoroughly disillusioned with the ALP as an “insipid version of the conservative parties”, his extra-parliamentary alternative, his passion, is quite conservative and economically right-wing with a focus on social justice around the margins. Latham sincerely laments how “the politics of ‘me’ has replaced the politics of ‘we’”, but his right-wing social democratic solution favours the former.

The corporate and state media, behaving in the typically shallow and sensationalist way that Latham rightly excoriates, focussed on the spite and venom of personality politics in the diaries. The name-calling and nicknames in The Latham Diaries, however, have a certain larrikin charm and are aimed at, in most cases, thoroughly deserving targets. They would not be out of place in any workplace or pub conversation. More importantly, past the abuse (and past a self-righteous tone that portrays Latham as the only cleanskin in the cesspool), lies a devastating critique of the vacuity of social-democratic, reformist politics.

So, Latham’s book is surprisingly good (on the futility of pinning one’s hopes on the ALP for even mild reforms, let alone radical progressive change). The book, however, is also predictably bad (right-wing, individualist solutions junking the power of the collective). In the pages of The Latham Diaries, those people who are interested in really taking on inequality, poverty and war can profitably learn from the good, and avoid the bad, that Latham offers.

From Green Left Weekly, November 9, 2005.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.

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