Mark Latham - The Latham Diaries

Mark Latham,

The Latham Diaries

Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2005

Pp. ix + 429.    Hardback                     ISBN 0 522 85215 7  

After establishing his Labor party credentials in local government in Sydney’s western suburbs, Mark Latham won Gough Whitlam’s one-time seat of Werriwa at a by-election in January 1994. Aged 32, he was ‘a young man in a hurry.’ (p. 24) After an eleven-year rollercoaster, he resigned as federal leader and left parliament altogether. Shortly afterwards, he published these diaries, and it can be safely predicted that he will not be going back into Labor politics. Latham began his parliamentary career fighting off testicular cancer, and collapsed during his only national election campaign suffering from pancreatitis. His first marriage broke up, leaving a time-bomb of threatened revelations, but he remarried and became a father. On the way, he became, to put it mildly, disillusioned with his party. He seems initially to have kept his intermittent diaries as private means of coping with the nastiness of caucus politics. His decision to publish is of course controversial. All a reviewer can do is to note that the document is now in the public domain, and assess it accordingly. Embodying the private thoughts of an explosive Australian, the entries employ a vocabulary that is notably excremental and copulatory. But blunt language is merely the surface: the real shock lies in Latham’s developing condemnation of his own party. Labor, he came to feel, believed it could succeed without offering a coherent philosophical response to the modern world. Latham wanted to challenge political shibboleths, invoke new agendas and rebuild communities. His colleagues seemed more interested in factional in-fighting. One MHR was driven to suicide, and Latham left politics was partly out of disgust at what he claimed were lies about his own private life. There are funny, or perhaps bizarre, moments, such as the legend that an informal gathering of the ALP National Executive, ‘the conversation at this all-male gathering inevitably [sic] turned to dick sizes.’ (p. 39) Labor heavyweights took turns to categorise their penises as either long or thick, but Bob Hawke claimed to be both. Whitlam would later dismiss the Hawke government as neither. Latham portrays his party colleagues as out of touch and self-serving, for instance reacting to extensive spending cuts in the first Howard government budget by complaining about moves to deprive them of air-miles on their parliamentary travel. ‘If Labor MPs are a bunch of greedy bastards, what hope is there for personal sacrifice and collectivism in the rest of society?’ (p. 59) In an appendix, he lists the bewildering array of sub-factions underlying modern Labor in-fighting. Latham broadly belonged to the Right and could not understand the Left – ‘they hate each other more than they hate the Libs’ (p. 256) ‘Often I’m a bad judge of character, too trusting of people and their motivations,’ he remarked in 2002 (p. 205) What would he have said of his colleagues had he been less indulgent? Latham especially disapproves of Kim Beazley, condemned as an opportunist ‘boredom machine’ (p. 118). He also dislikes New South Wales premier Bob Carr. Carr is ‘the kid from the schoolyard who was so gawky that he got pounded with rocks every day’, who entered politics to make people like him, but without success (p. 33). His verdict on other named colleagues includes ‘as useful as pockets in your underpants’, ‘a habitual liar’ and ‘a sandwich short of a picnic’ (pp. 251-2). The life of a federal party leader is not made easier by Labor’s state allies, who ‘are in it for themselves. They open a few schools and hospitals, and think they are King Shit’ (p. 283). The party itself he dismisses as a ‘sewer’ and ‘a lost cause’. (pp. 139, 186) Its membership base is ‘a joke’, perhaps totalling 7,500 active branch members across Australia, ‘enough to fill a small suburban soccer ground’ (pp. 104, 398). (There is something intensely dismissive about this citation of the wimpish immigrant perversion of a football code.) In two short sentences, he considered and dismissed as impossible the idea of launching a wholly new party. Instead, this interesting man quit, and poured out his disillusion in print. The ALP, it seems, is pretending that the diaries have not happened. A reviewer at a distance notes with surprise that Latham admired Tony Blair. Both he and Beazley talked of possibly moving to Britain and working for third-way New Labour. Pleasant, too, to note that Latham’s 2002 Menzies Lecture, at London University’s Australian Studies Centre, helped shake up his ideas about policy. Priests (or, as Latham calls them, ‘kiddie-fiddlers’) who use the Book of Common Prayer invite true believers to ‘read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest’. You should certainly read Mark if you are interested in Australian politics, you will learn much but you will need a strong stomach to manage the inward digestion of his bleak and depressing message.