Campbell: Latham’s second career as the house jester Labor turncoat says a lot about conservatism
Mark Latham’s ears should be echoing to the laughter of the common folk whose opinions he claims the ability to channel, writes James Campbell.
Opinion
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Many years ago when I was a student, a distinguished American historian long resident in Australia, remarked to me that he long been amused by many of his colleagues’ claim that their origins gave them the right to speak on behalf of the working class despite the obvious fact that had all worked hard to leave that world behind them.
When he challenged this, he said, they didn’t take it well.
I’ve been reminded of this every time in the past few years I’ve been forced to endure the spectacle of Mark Latham’s tribune of the people act.
To be sure, Latham began his life in humble circumstances. We know this, of course, for more than 20 years he has been telling us at every opportunity that presents.
The reality of his life since he left university has been somewhat different of course.
In 2014 he regaled his readers in that people’s paper the Australian Financial Review with his recollections of Gough Whitlam’s 68th birthday party, which had been held at the “Harry Seidler-designed Australian Embassy, with its sweeping views of the River Seine and Trocadero Gardens”, a spot he explained which “each year was the perfect spot for watching the Bastille Day (July 14) fireworks”.
Latham, the ’umble boy from Green Valley, was there in his capacity as Whitlam’s factotum during his time as our ambassador to UNESCO.
By mid-1980s he was back in Australia and an elected official, first as councillor and then mayor of Liverpool.
By the time he was 35, he was already in federal parliament and hence a member of Australia’s most exclusive club, the Qantas chairman’s lounge.
It would be unfair to say Latham achieved nothing during his time in Canberra except the re-election of the Howard Government in 2004 with an increased majority.
Spotting an opportunity to prey upon the resentment the have-nots have always had for other people’s perks – “it only a rort if you’re not in on it” – ahead of that poll, Latham announced that if he was elected Labor would abolish pensions for retiring politicians.
There was no way Howard was going to let Latham gain that advantage, so he rushed through legislation closing the scheme to everyone elected after 2006.
Latham’s offence at the scale of the taxpayer-funds lavished on ex-politicians, it turned out, did not extend to the money we were up for to keep him.
The hypocrisy of denouncing parliamentary pensions while trousering one himself is so huge that, for the rest of his life, Latham’s ears ought to have echoed to the laughter of the common folk whose opinions he claims the ability to channel.
But that for 20 years after the pubic decided he was no good, Latham has managed to enjoy a second career as the house jester Labor turncoat, says a lot about Australian conservatism, none of it good.
But then the Right in this country has never been very good at spotting Labor phonies.
How else can you can explain the way Tony Abbott, Christopher Pyne and the cast of the HR Nicholls Society all fell for a fraud like Kathy Jackson, a convicted embezzler of the union fees of hospital toilet cleaners?
That Latham flopped last weekend does not excuse people who should have known better from grasping that the whole act was designed to help bring Labor to power in NSW.
If Latham was really the anti-woke warrior he claimed, he would have been careful to avoid doing anything that would give the state a government that will in short time begin implementing a social agenda borrowed from Daniel Andrews’ Victoria.
An easy way to do that would have been to encourage his voters to give their preferences to the Perrotett Government.
Instead he focused his attacks almost entirely, almost exclusively, upon the Liberal Party, encouraging his supporters to vote 1 only.
As it turns out, it appears the only people stupid enough to listen him were Liberals who failed to grasp what he was about and who will now have plenty of time to discover how they were played.
It will be interesting to see if Latham’s latest controversy – a scatological tweet not fit to be printed in a family newspaper but OK apparently for the Daily Mail Australia – finally sees him banished from polite society.
Already Pauline Hanson is moving away from him as fast as she can.
Who would thought that when they began their unlikely relationship that the association would end up doing more damage to her reputation than to his?
He won’t be leaving us for a while yet, of course, not for eight years in fact, though his connection to Hanson will soon be severed I suspect.
He ought to have been up for re-election in another four, but the pension pocketer pulled a swifty before this year’s poll by resigning his seat half-way through his term and running again at the head of One Nation’s ticket last Saturday.
When he eventually leaves that parliament, of course, he will be free to resume the parliamentary pension he decided no one after him should be allowed to enjoy.
I suspect it’s going to be a wild ride in the meantime.
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