Mark Latham

Mark Latham rose to the leadership of the Labor Party unexpectedly, lost the 2004 federal election, retired to sulk from the sidelines, and has done so ever since. Whether he or Graham Richardson has done more damage to the party that nurtured them is a question I leave to the blogosphere. Before Latham became leader in 2003, he published considerably more about his vision for Labor than most parliamentarians have done, though none of his publications was as readable as his post-retirement diaries (2005), in which he displayed a lack of judgement and such scant goodwill to his colleagues that it leaves one astounded that they ever elected him leader. (When Latham ran against Kim Beazley for the leadership, two of the wiser members of caucus, Carmen Lawrence and Lindsay Tanner, counselled me against becoming too enthusiastic. They were clearly correct.)

This is a selection of the quotations Mark Latham collected during his time in local and federal politics. The quotations are arranged alphabetically by subject, from ‘Aboriginal People’ to ‘Working Class’. Given Latham’s career, it is not surprising that the emphasis is on political quotations and quotations from politicians.

Some quotations are quite familiar, as with Winston Churchill’s comment on a former Conservative MP who was seeking to stand as a liberal: ‘The only instance of a rat swimming towards a sinking ship.’ I was touched by Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s incisive critique of colonising missionaries: ‘When the missionaries first came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said “Let us pray” and when we opened our eyes, we had the Bible and they had the land.’ Charles de Gaulle demonstrates Gallic culinary wit: ‘How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?’ Readers will find their own favourites.

It is sobering to read these two optimistic works about a man of promise, written in mid-2004, in the light of their subject’s defeat in October 2004. Neither author was convinced that Latham could win. Barry Donovan has too much experience of the vagaries of the electorate to be anything but cautious, though he concludes with the hope that ‘the Lodge may yet have a prime minister’s young kids bouncing around in it before Christmas’. Through Margaret Simons’s essay runs an undercurrent of doubt about such a possibility, and she identifies Latham’s Achilles heel: ‘For decades, voters have been told that the main job of politicians is to manage the economy ... [and] I doubt if Latham will be able to convince them that it is now acceptable to vote on the basis of social issues, and the concrete things that directly affect their lives.’

In the midst of transition to the information economy, there is a need for thinking about learning in ways that will help us to reconstruct the education system, while enhancing its critical and reflective role, and improving equality of opportunity. This new book by Mark Latham, a Labor MHR, isn’t it, though at first glance many will think it might be. Consciously or otherwise, it’s a substantial surrender to new Right ways of thinking. Worse, it’s intellectually sloppy and rife with obvious and unresolved contradictions.