Mark Latham’s bold ideas sink in a sea of bile

MARK Latham has provided a definitive “yes” to the question of whether politicians can actually write.

Mark Latham shakes hands with then prime minister John Howard.

MARK Latham has for some time now been the bovver boy of Australian politics, more famous for snarky remarks and violent handshakes — you wonder if John Howard’s arm ever quite recovered — than any grand plans for the nation.

Yet the former Labor leader has provided a definitive “yes” to the question of whether politicians can actually write. From the enthralling, if terrifying, Latham Diaries (2005) to his expert Quarterly Essay about the future of the ALP, Not Dead Yet (2013), Latham has demonstrated the quick wit and intellectual sparkle that made him, at one point, the nation’s favourite for the Lodge.

Now we have The Political Bubble, with its provocative subtitle: Why Australians Don’t Trust Politics. In true Latham fashion, a lot a space in this book is devoted to ripping apart old enemies and sneering at opponents. It’s a shame because under the rage and the bile and what looks at times like pure hatred, he does articulate a manifesto for governance that may intrigue people with a love of politics, even if it sometimes lacks coherence.

“A common theme has emerged: too much politics,” Latham writes. His argument at the most basic level is that as Australians have acquired university degrees and prospered, politics has lost its primacy as the driving force of society and the economy.

“Instead of agitating for citizens to find fresh enthusiasm for parliamentary politics, it might make better sense to concede to the inevitable.”

It’s a sobering, even grim, proposition in its implications. But Latham’s proposed solutions to the problem can be startling.

“Australians need to hear an honest assessment of what government can and can’t do,” he writes, and that’s fair enough. Latham’s view that the bogeyman of “cost-of-living pressures” has lowered the level of political debate is a reasonable contention. In many ways, the government (whether Labor or Liberal) has to admit it cannot solve all the problems in the world. But to go on to suggest that fiscal policy and climate change policy — two areas where governments do have the power to lead — should be handed over to a Reserve Bank-style independent body is an odd proposition.

This independent body idea acts as a metaphor for the book’s central inconsistency. Latham’s assertion that governments really don’t affect peoples’ lives all that much is one he contradicts again and again. And perhaps most disturbingly, he suggests the only remedy is to pare back our democracy. In support of his push to hand more power to independent bodies he writes: “Most MPs lack appropriate tertiary training and qualifications.” Are the people’s representatives just not good enough to govern any more? Who would not in the face of this cry out that ancient political phrase: “Well, that would put us on a slippery slope.”

This is not to suggest that everything Latham suggests as vaccine to our democratic flu is a cure worse than the disease. His continued call for internal party reform — the opening up of memberships, holding US-style primary contests for candidates, reducing factional power — is logically extended here to include the Liberal Party. And in the light of the Palmer United Party phenomenon, his suggestion that we seriously impose campaign expenditure limits is persuasive. Even his attachment to voluntary voting, a divisive issue for many, makes sense from a number of angles.

But Latham’s policy ideas are bold and colourful and likely to annoy all sorts of people. Some of them may be integrally flawed but at least Latham is trying to start a conversation about what the nation-state in 2014 can truly and without pretences offer Australians and what we need to change about it. His notion of “minimalist politics” may provoke us to discuss whether it’s time for parliament itself to be dragged into the big government/small government debate.

In between those sparking ideas, those visions splendid of our democratic future, there are close-ups of the Latham a lot of people love to hate, the bruiser who will eat anyone for breakfast. There are some good one-liners — “COAG (Council of Australian Governments) meetings are starting to look like a Liberal Party sub-branch of ancestry.com.au,” he says of the handful of Liberal warlords’ sons who are now state premiers — but too often the personal nature of Latham’s attacks is off-putting, as is the case with his pungent criticisms of many journalists. It seems you can take the boy out of the NSW Right but you can’t take the NSW Right out of the boy.

Still, Latham does make a lot of sense on some issues affecting the political classes today. His chapter on climate change will infuriate both sides but provides a good analysis of why the issue has degenerated in recent years. He argues persuasively that a battle between climate alarmists wrongly connecting climate change to weather events and denialists who are scared “environmentalism” is a code-word for “socialism” has queered the pitch and confused the public.

He is more than willing to pile it on the Left. He calls the open-door immigration policy of Kevin Rudd’s first term “the nation’s greatest peacetime humanitarian disaster” and he criticises the constant discussion of gender politics by what he calls a “feminist tribe settling scores with their male counterparts”. Like his criticism of most things, this lacks any sense of nuance, of any empathy for other people’s views.

On the other hand, a lot of it may ring true to readers who see a left wing movement of quasi-loons obsessed with marginal issues.

As for the Liberals, well, they won’t be signing up Latham just yet. He is correct in questioning the government’s economic narrative. How can we be “open for business” but turn back Graincorp? How can we be cutting welfare but spending billions on paid parental leave? It’s all very cogent but again there’s that fatal snarkiness, that bully-boy mentality getting in the way of a human perspective.

It’s too easy to come to a book by a politician full of preconceptions. It’s a shame that these men and women — with their intriguing tales to tell and their big ideas for the nation — are so often lost on to the wayside of our literary culture. But when you open this book, even if you try to blot out his name on the cover, everything you know and fear about Mark Latham is there on show.

He can write better than most of his peers and he’s not afraid to put out bold policy ideas even when they are half-formed. He has a marvellous political mind. It’s just sad that the mean streak has never quite washed off.

Richard Ferguson is a freelance writer.

The Political Bubble: Why Australians Don’t Trust Politics

By Mark Latham

Macmillan Australia, 310pp, $32.99