Australian Politics

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.)

Arthur Augustus Calwell is hardly the most celebrated or mythologised politician in the history of the Australian Labor Party. His achievements as the first minister for immigration have been overshadowed by his very public advocacy of the White Australia policy ...

In The Australian Moment: How We Were Made for These Times, George Megalogenis tries to explain how, in spite of ourselves, we managed to survive the last three ‘super crashes of the digital age’. He does so by actively avoiding the usual partisan morality tales, complete with intra-party rivalry ...

As of writing, Australia has six living ex-prime ministers – not quite a record. Of these, one, of course, is still in parliamentary harness, and may still aspire to the top job. Of the remaining five, all but one have provided us with voluminous accounts of their stewardship. The exception is our twenty-fourth prime minister, Paul Keating (1991–96). Not that he has not promised, or rather threatened, such an account, telling his great rival Bob Hawke, ‘if I get around to writing a book, and I might, I will be telling the truth; the whole truth ... [of] how lucky you were to have me to drive the government during your down years, leaving you with the credit for much of the success’. One can imagine how his publishers must salivate at the prospect.

On 7 November, Paul Keating appeared on ABC TV’s 7.30 to promote his new book of speeches,  After Words. Keating’s response to Leigh Sales’s first question about political leadership was instructive:

This book is long overdue. It is eighty years since affable Joseph Lyons, often depicted by cartoonists as a koala, was elected as Australia’s tenth prime minister. He would be re-elected twice before dying in office in April 1939. During his seven years as prime minister, Lyons had to grapple with the Depression ...

The heroes and villains in Nick Dyrenfurth’s account of the early Labor Party are the cartoon figures in the labour press that he uses to explore its political rhetoric. The heroes are sturdy working men, sometimes in bush garb, sometimes industrial labourers. The villains take various forms: serpents, harpies, bloodsucking insects, menacing aliens, but above all the Fat Man, the swollen, grotesque embodiment of capitalist greed. Dyrenfurth observes that Mr Fat is a far more ubiquitous device in Australian radical iconography than its counterparts elsewhere. British cartoons used a variety of villains: aristocratic loafers, rapacious landlords, ruthless sweaters, mendacious press barons. Those in the United States were less likely to personify capitalism with a generic capitalist villain than to depict combines and trusts.

The 2010 federal election fell on my wife’s birthday: 21 August. Being political tragics, we didn’t stop for birthday cake. Instead, we handed out roughly 1600 how-to-vote cards for the Australian Labor Party in suburban Melbourne. Our local polling booth is the Vista Valley Kindergarten, in Bulleen. This kindergarten cum polling booth, which sits in more of a gully than a valley and offers no vistas, is located in the north-eastern corner of the electorate of Menzies, held by ultraconservative Liberal frontbencher Kevin Andrews. The battle for Vista Valley mirrored the national poll. In the Vista Valley count, the ALP’s primary vote collapsed, the Greens’ soared, more people voted informal than backed Family First, yet, thanks to the preferences of Greens voters, Labor fell across the line by four votes.