Oz Politics Blog

I have just finished Annabel Crabb’s Losing it: The inside story of the Labor Party in Opposition. This is the third book this year to cover similar territory. First there was Bernard Lagan’s Loner, and who could forget The Latham Diaries.

What can I say? It was well written. Crabb has a great turn of phrase. It was more analytical than Lagan. But while it was a good read, it was not a great read. To be fair, for me at least, it suffered from being the third to til the same soil. Perhaps it was as Crabb predicted,

Books about parties in opposition have none of the flash and swagger of books about parties in government; this is acknowledged, and the author offers her apologies accordingly. Books about governments are marvels of mechanism: how Decision A was made thanks to a deal between ministers B and C; how Tycoon D met secretly with the prime minister to orchestrate the thwarting of Tycoon E, staring down the opposition of ministers F and G. Books about oppositions instead have as their meat and bread a battleground much more personal, often more bloody, and from which a purpose is invariably harder to divine. [p.2]

Crabb attributed much of Latham’s failure at the election to his many personal failings. In terms of the personal failings, I found this Liberal Party research following the ‘lay off my family’ media conference hit the nail on the head.

Liberal Party internal research on attitudes to their new young adversary; however, conducted after Latham’s explosive press conference, detected a subterranean trend of uncertainty about him. While focus group participants reported that they thought Latham was ‘interesting’ and ‘fresh’ and ‘challenging’, there were other, darker appraisals.

Some thought he was ‘embarrassing, crude and crass’ or ‘unpredictable and erratic’. The research also found voters who believed Latham was ‘hypocritical (he dishes it out, but can’t take it)’, ‘weak (he cries)’, and ‘dangerous (he mistreated his first wife)’. There’s something wrong with his personality,’ concluded one contributor in the anonymous survey group.

The analysis of this research, submitted to the Liberal Party as the federal election loomed close, had an encouraging message for the Government despite Mark Latham’s continuing popularity: ‘Labor is singing a tune of better health and education outcomes, fairer tax cuts, and more opportunities for people. It all sounds good to these voters, but they worry about the dark side of Mark Latham’s personality, and the dark side of Labor which is their proven inability to manage the nation’s finances. [p.226]

One of Crabb’s theses is that Labor has not been competitive at recent elections in part because it is out of touch with the electorate. Crabb identified two sources of disconnect. First, the Coalition has outclassed Labor on qualitative polling. Second, Labor’s union-based, factional arrangements produced practitioners that respond the party’s erosion of external influence nationally “by clinging to the power they wield internally… Latham’s complaint that more than a third of his Caucus considered themselves to be factional ‘powerbrokers’ is perfectly justified.” [p.281].

Perhaps as a result of this perceived weakness, Labor has fallen into the dangerous habit of fighting each [election] campaign roughly as if it were the last one. It’s a generalisation, but not an unfair one; the 2001 campaign was planned on the basis that Australians hated and would continue to hate the GST, for example, which had nearly lost the 1998 election for the Government. In the 2004 campaign, meanwhile, Latham did a good job of neutralising the national security issue which had proved so dominant in 2001, but failed to judge the extent to which the real battleground would be the economy. [pp.282-283]

Like I said, it’s a good read but not a great read — three and a half stars.

I bought it. I read it. What’s more, I enjoyed it and I would recommend it to others.

I am as surprised as you. After the 24-7, coast-to-coast coverage in the media I was not expecting to enjoy it.

At one level, everything you have heard about this book is true. It is a sledge-fest. Hate, vengeance, vitriol — they are all there in abundance. It is blokey: four letter words and gross stories come a plenty. There are inaccuracies. There are (what appear to be) post facto flourishes. There is a disconnect between how Latham expects to be treated and his treatment of others. In short, it is a colourful tome.

Before I dipped into the Diaries, I was planning an acerbic review. The objective would have been to out-Latham Latham and scoff at the many inconsistencies. It was not a new idea — indeed, many reviews have taken this route. I figured cheap shots are warranted with trashy books. But behind the tabloid facade, I found an unexpected insightfulness into Latham, Labor and Australian politics. So rather than trawl through Latham’s personal flaws (all of which are confirmed by his Diaries), I thought I would pick over a couple of the many insights on offer.

Let’s start with the one myth that must be put to bed. It’s the myth that Latham blamed everyone else and did not accept responsibility for his failures. Well half a myth — Latham does share the blame around. But there are numerous entries where he acknowledged he did not know what to do; where he admitted to errors of judgement; mistakes in his first marriage; and in particular, where he recognised his mistakes on the 2004 election campaign. These mistakes included the slow and ineffective advertising campaign, the complex and reactive tax and family policy, the Tassie forests policy, and not distancing himself from state Labor problems like the Scoresby freeway in Victoria and Orange Grove in New South Wales. On this front, at least, I found a more balanced Latham than the media.

Latham’s central thesis is that the Australian Labor Party is no longer a party working for the workers. Labor is no longer a labour party. It is run by the machine men for the machine men.

[T]he majority of branch members are ethnic stacks, the lost souls who can barely speak English, organised into the Party by property developers interested in municipal preselections, or Lebanese hustlers looking for community grants, migration assistance and an easy life. They never attend any meetings but end up in the attendance book courtesy of rorting branch officials. And most of them do it. That’s the sorry state of workers’ representation in the modern Labor Party. [p.184]

When I worked at NSW Party headquarters in 1987-88, I remember the General Secretary, Steve Loosley, saying to me, ‘The big decision we need to make is whether we actually need a rank-and-file membership’. It took me a while to work out he wasn’t joking. With modern fundraising capacity and campaign technology, it is possible to run a successful political party without any local branch members. That’s what Labor has become, a virtual party controlled by a handful of machine men. [p.185]

All this rhetoric about unions being the backbone of the ALP is tosh. Worker representation is a great socialist ideal. But in practice, it has produced a cohort of officials who are out of touch with their membership and undemocratic in their values. The average union member couldn’t give two hoots if their union sends delegates to Labor Party conferences. The officials, however, use this unrepresentative power to throw their weight around inside the Party and try to run the parliamentarians by remote control. It’s a house of cards. [p.186]

A few dozen Party officials and faction bosses have the power to run the organisation: who goes to Parliament, how they vote in Caucus ballots, the outcomes at party forums. Very few people progress without their say so: through Young Labor, into State ministerial offices, recruited for future parliamentary service. It’s a dense network of influence, a political mafia full of favours, patronage, and, if anyone falls out with them, payback. [p.399]

Latham makes two broad criticisms of Beazley. First, he is weak on policy. The second criticism centres on allegations of muck-raking. This quote from 22 November 2001 captures a little of the first.

Whitlam used to call the Victorian ALP ‘impotent but pure’. It’s not a bad description of Beazley’s impact on Federal Labor. I can think of five big policy areas where Kim has gutted us:

• We love the symbolism of the Republic, reconciliation and immigration (so-called population policy), yet at election time we know these issues are uncampaignable. We treat them like the mad uncle in the attic.
• We want more government spending on education, health and just about everything else, yet the fiscal well has run dry. Beazley’s front bench only had one policy — how to spend more money — but ultimately they could not campaign on it.
• We look to the welfare state to solve poverty, yet it has no answers to the social dimension of the problem, say, when bad parents pass their dysfunctional lifestyle on to their kids. The big issues are social, but Beazley Labor had noting to say about social capital.
• We want to plan and control industries, yet the complexity of the new economy makes this impossible. Our attempt ends up looking like Barry Jones’s Noodle Nation.
• We want to run the country and modernise its institutions, yet our own structure is moribund — trade unions, local branches, Party conferences, preselection processes, plus our policy-making culture.

And another quote on Beazley, which captures elements of both critiques, this time from 1 August 1998:

Unfortunately Labor has contributed to the Hansonite surge with its populism on tariffs. We should never have let the protectionist genie out of its bottle. Economic isolationism is the flipside of social racism, encouraging people to think the worst of other nations and people. It also has a domino effect — just look at the special pleading groups that have jumped out of the ground in recent times. I never realised how correct Peter Walsh was in this argument.

I’m taking flak in the media for standing up to Beazley’s economic irrationalism. His mate Oakes bagging me in the Bulletin last week: ‘It is not a good time for any politician in any party to be marked with the economic rationalist brand. Labor’s Shadow Education Minister, Mark Latham, is a case in point’. Beazley’s people fed him a crazy critique of my proposals for welfare reform by the Queens Beach ALP Branch in North Queensland (of all places). Make no mistake, Beazley and Hanson are singing from the same economic song sheet.

Where would Latham like to take Labor? After the 2004 Election loss he made these observations to his comrades.

It’s horseshit to say we need to shift to the Left, per the Barry Jones remedy; or to the Right, the Billy Shorten solution. Were we too far to the Right on the environment, schools funding, saving Medicare or getting out of Iraq? Were we too far to the Left on the abolition of ATSIC, redefining multiculturalism, holding the line of refugees, on gay marriage or our welfare-to-work policy, which was denounced by ACOSS?

I don’t believe in the old ideologies. We are a modern progressive party; breaking down the old Establishment and dispensing power to citizens and communities — the enabling state. We don’t do things because they are Left- or Right-wing, we do them because they are right. So I reject the Jones and Shorten analysis.

Three strategies for the future:

• We gave away our economic credibility post-1996; we need to rebuild it. It’s a three-year job, appealing to the new class of free-agents and entrepreneurs. We need to find a way through Howard’s structure: our campaign against him on truth/responsibility is not sufficient to beat his perceived economic strengths.
• We need to maintain our existing strengths, not walk away from good Labour policy on health, education and the environment.
• We need to change the way the party operates. Are we a political party or a federation of sub-factions? We have 88 Federal MPs and 31 of them are so-called power-brokers, with their own little group and numbers. The main factions have broken down into personal fiefdoms and tribes. This has institutionalised conflict and made the task of leading the show more difficult. How do you consult with 31 different people on any given day? What does this party need: a Leader or a receptionist who’s on the phone all day.?

A big question is whether this book will hurt Labor and Beazley. Unequivocally, the answer is yes. You can expect to hear colourful quotes between now and the next election. I would be stunned if it did not feature in Coalition advertising come the next election. But with time, and given the dignified but dismissive treatment it is getting from Labor, I suspect the damage will be minimal.

In summary, it is a book packed with insights on Australian politics and the key policy debates between 1994 and 2004. It’s a passionate insider’s view: biased, at times jaundiced and occasionally over the top. It is as Latham claimed, politics in the raw. I found it a bloody good read. Four stars.

Update: Crikey and Mike Steketee both have reviews worth reading.

Update — 28 September 2005: Latham comes across as both clever and deeply flawed. It is not an unusual combination, though it would be worrying in a prime minister. In my review, I decided to focus on the clever. In his second post publication interview with Mark Latham, Tony Jones peeled back on the deeply flawed.

Update #2 — 28 September 2005: A couple of good essay’s on the Crikey site.

At work I do a lot of job interviews. An interview question I often ask is, “Tell about a recent mistake you have made in the workplace. What you did to fix it and what did you learn from the experience?” There is no right answer to this question. I am interested to see how self-aware applicants are, how honest they will be with me, and the extent to which they take responsibility for their mistakes.

Towards the end of an interview I often ask, “We all have strengths and weaknesses. You have talked about your strengths but not your weaknesses. Where do you think you would benefit from further development? What have you done recently to address that development need?” Again, there is no right answer. It is a test of self awareness, and taking responsibility for personal development.

While there are no right answers to these questions, there are some wrong answers. One is the person, who says he or she has never made a mistake in the workplace. I don’t believe my children when they say they haven’t told a lie. And I don’t believe the applicant who has never made a mistake. The only person who has not made a mistake is the person who has done nothing. The absence of a development need raises similar questions in my mind. If a person has no weakness and has never made a mistake, I wonder how they might perform working in teams where everyone else has imperfections (myself included).

I have been mulling for sometime on how Latham would answer these questions. I might be wrong, but I have not seen him take any responsibility for the October 2004 defeat. It was everyone else’s fault. The only weakness he has admitted was the incredulous, “I am an outsider.”

Another interview question I sometimes ask is, “What do you do when you can’t convince your boss or your co-workers that your way is the right way? How do you go about changing their opinion?” It brings me to another trait I have observed in Latham. He had a tendency to say (in effect), “if we are not going to play marbles by my rules, I am packing my marbles and going home.” The irony is that politics is the art of the possible. Of necessity it involves negotiation and compromise. It necessitates give and take until a large enough coalition of support is built.

In 2004, Latham appeared to be of the view that “good” ideas of themselves were sufficient to win an election. In 1998, he took himself to the backbench in high dudgeon over Beazley’s refusal to accept his education policies without amendment. Just as “my way or the highway” is not a recipe for a good team member, it is not a recipe for a successful politician either.

The 2004 election was a job interview for Latham. Sadly, for him, he did not get the job.

In the workplace I am interested to see how people cope with disappointment when they don’t win a job. It is a test of maturity. Do they seek to learn from the experience so that they are more competitive next time? Do they take remedial action in respect of their deficiencies? Do they knuckle down to demonstrate their strengths or do they give up in a huff? Do they blame everyone but themselves for their failure to win the job?

With his Diaries, not only has Latham lost the job, he has failed the post recruitment maturity test.

Update: Tim Blair has trawled the media for today’s Latham report.

Red Rag has a spoof on the Latham diaries. (Be warned: it contains very offensive language).

Annabel Crabb is publishing her own book on the 2004 election: Losing it. The link is to an extract – an interesting read.

It looks like Latham may have cut a few too many mutually exclusive exclusives when he launched his new book.

The SMH is running an internet poll on whether you believe Latham. After some 10,000 votes the results are 38 per cent believe all his claims, 32 per cent believe only some of his claims, and 29 per cent do not believe his claims.

Apparently, Latham has named Penny Fischer and Kate Ellis as women at the centre of false harassment allegations. The named women have also denied the allegations.

In another all-care-no-responsibility moment, Latham blamed Labor’s advertising strategy for the 2004 election loss.

The Australian editorialises: Voters vindicated by Latham diaries. Swan agrees.

Elizabeth Gosch and Helen McCabe undertook a gender analysis: “Women feature strongly in Mark Latham’s diaries. In often unflattering and crude language, he trashes wives, colleagues and journalists”.

A link to the Denton interview

A link to the Lateline interview

Update: Kim Beazley’s daughters respond to the criticisms of their father.

I love a good book review, and Paul Kelly’s review of The Latham Diaries is a goodie.

The way Kelly calls it, Latham’s Diaries takes us into Latham’s fantasy world. It ‘explains’ Latham’s own demise, Labor’s terminal pathology, and yet another Labor defeat at Howard’s hands. It has the tone of a tragic-farce. Like all good tragedies, there are many deaths.

He denounces nearly all his former colleagues … He attacks or criticises Kim Beazley, Kevin Rudd (repeatedly), Jenny Macklin, Lindsay Tanner, Bob McMullan, Tim Gartrell (at length), Robert Ray, Stephen Conroy, Anthony Albanese, Wayne Swan, Stephen Smith, Bob Carr, Simon Crean and even Paul Keating and Gough Whitlam, among others.

For Kelly, Latham’s story was not compelling. There were too many inconsistencies.

So the Diaries reveal Latham as a pessimist about politics and a pessimist about human nature. Too often he sees the worst in people. So unforgiving of others, he is often forgiving of himself.

…

Yet his Diaries have a bizarre duality. Latham is a victim and an attack dog, moving effortlessly between such contradictory identities. He thrived for a long time in the dysfunctional culture that he condemns and his Diaries is riddled with a random and casual brutality that is a case study in the political violence he deplores.

…

“On any given day dozens of Labor politicians would be on the phone gossiping, plotting and spreading rumours about their so-called colleagues,” Latham writes. “Nothing was off-limits. Personal and private matters were seen as fair game.” Yet he seems oblivious to the great political support the party delivered him during his run to the 2004 poll.

Kelly’s conclusion …

Latham has now taken his own flight to escapism. Reaction to his book will confirm his sharp pen but reveal his defective ear. The issue raised by his diaries is whether the sickness lies in the system, as he claims, or in himself.

Update — 15 September 2005

Just a selection of the column inches dedicated to this story …

• Seven News: Angry ALP attacks Latham and his book
• AM: Rudd dismisses Latham diaries as fiction
• The World Today: Latham scorns Labor in vitriolic diary
• The Age: Beazley considers legal action
• News: ‘Mad Mark’, Telstra form a brutal day for Labor
• The Age: Bitter loser or brave tell-all?
• SMH: Beazley’s a waste of space, says Latham
• Telegraph: I didn’t beg for job: Rudd
• CM: Gallop slams Latham diaries
• AM: A caustic Latham targets Labor icons
• The Age: Claims “sad and fanciful”, says Beazley
• The Age: Latham biting hand that fed him: Beazley
• The Age: Labor senators slam former leader
• Telegraph: Opposition MPs back Beazley
• News: Rudd returns Latham broadside
• Telegraph: Diaries of a mad period in politics
• Australian: Latham a product of ALP, says PM
• Australian: Rudd ‘no good on foreign affairs’
• Australian: Beazley indecent: Latham
• Australian: Latham’s long trail of backstabbing
• Australian: Costello revels in ‘that thing’ Mark said
• Australian: Dear diary, what a media circus I’ve created
• Australian: Latham a product of the ALP, says PM
• Australian: Latham claims sad, fanciful: Beazley
• The Age: Beazley brushes off Latham barbs
• The Age: King Conga strikes back
• Telegraph: Beazley hopes to weather the storm
• SMH: He’s back: Latham’s Spleen Inc