The interesting, and probably enduring, thing about The Latham Diaries is not Mark Latham’s critique of the Labor Party, or even what the book tells about his own self-centredness and self-destructiveness. What might endure is the funeral pyre of the ‘climb the ladder of opportunity’ Laborism that Latham tried, without great success, to articulate.
Latham genuinely saw himself as a Third Way politician, reaching for the images he sought to evoke about himself and the modern Labor Party. The ladder stuff, and his projection of himself as a disadvantaged working-class boy made good and wanting to make it better for others, was critical to this. So also was the phrase he once blurted out, then later bowdlerised, of his mother’s once telling him that there are two types of people in the world: the workers and the bludgers.
Labor was going to shed all of this bleeding-heart stuff of being the party of the underclasses, the whingers, the work-shy and the welfare lobbies. It was, rather, the party of the aspirational working man who wanted a decent education for his kids, a healthy fun environment and rewards for effort. Not a party without compassion, of course, but with warmth and energy for the strivers and the triers, and punishments as well for those who wouldn’t shape up. Aborigines? Well, they were disadvantaged and needed some extra help to climb on to the ladder of opportunity, but only so as to put them in an equal place. Refugees? Well, they were just criminals at the end of the day, weren’t they?
This was the Mark Latham and the Labor Party packaged for the last election, even if the disparagement of the poor was sotto voce. This was the Labor and the Latham who failed, even against a government which had shown every sign of having had its run. And which was, of course, not only reaching out, with much the same narrative, to the constituencies Latham claimed to be able to speak for, but doing so with far more conspicuous success. And, with that success, developing not only a new lease of political life but a radical new agenda not only for industrial relations changes but revolution in the welfare system.
Indeed, it is the welfare-to-work agenda that will mark the Howard Government far more than any industrial relations changes it is able to push through. Some have underrated it, in part because of Howard’s