Once Labor’s great white hope, Latham’s now just a black Mark

For two decades, Labor voters have hidden their embarrassment over having vested their hopes in Mark Latham. Amid the latest Lathamisms – a term for a squalid little ooze of gall from the so-called “upper house” – it is worth pausing to remember what he offered when he became federal opposition leader in 2003.

Presenting as articulate and intelligent, Mark Latham had worked, in his 20s, for John Kerin, Gough Whitlam and Bob Carr, and had been mayor of Liverpool Council at age 30. He has a Sydney University economics degree and played footy for the Liverpool Bulls. His book Civilising Global Capital, published when he was 37, described a crisis for the industrial working class as one of structural and technological change that could be addressed through education, upskilling and the “ladder of opportunity”.

Illustration by Dionne GainCredit:

By 2003, Latham argued that under the leadership of Kim Beazley the party had drifted from the reformist ambition of Whitlam, Hawke and Keating. Beazley, softened by years in government, had been too weak on the republic referendum and Tampa, too bipartisan over Australia’s subservience to George W. Bush’s fraudulent invasion of Iraq, too nice to take up the fight to John Howard and his “conga line of suckholes” (another Lathamism).

When he became leader, Latham was also, appealingly, an outsider, criticising the factional system that brought down Beazley’s successor Simon Crean. Latham offered plainspoken independent thinking and genuine opposition to the Howard government. One of his mentors, former senator Stephen Loosley, said he had a gift for speaking past Canberra and straight into Australia’s lounge rooms. Mungo McCallum wrote that Latham had “many qualities that were not only desirable and attractive but are in short supply in today’s ALP”. One of Latham’s key internal supporters was Julia Gillard. Under his leadership, Labor recruited Peter Garrett and, in his first year, Latham was easily outpolling Howard.

By the 2004 election, voters were looking past the ideals and the pedigree and sniffing the character. There were stories of a fistfight to settle a Liverpool council dispute, salacious rumours about his buck’s night, then his first wife Gabrielle Gwyther’s claim that they broke up because he wanted an open marriage. Latham has variously denied these allegations.

Then there was the Howard handshake, which still gets replayed as if it shows us what we should have seen from the beginning. At a radio studio the day before the 2004 election, Latham took his opponent’s hand as if to put him in a “Cumberland throw”. Swing voters had seen all they needed, and Latham became the first new federal Labor leader in 87 years to lose seats. Having styled himself as the charismatic outsider, the lone wolf, Latham attributed the result to colleagues leaving him with too much to do on his own.

A notorious pre-election handshake with then-prime minister John Howard confirmed the misgivings hundreds of thousands of voters had harboured about Mark Latham.Credit: Penny Bradfield

There were signs, beneath the Labor “true belief”, of a cruel streak. In his own words, Latham was “a hater. Part of the tribalness of politics is to really dislike the other side with intensity. And the more I see of them the more I hate them … John Howard tries to appeal to suburban values when I know that he hasn’t got any real answers to the problems and challenges we face. I hate the phoniness of that.”

This might have expressed a widespread grievance, but where did it cross into the tribalness of an “A-grade arsehole” (not my words but Latham’s, to describe Labor premiers Carr, Peter Beattie and Geoff Gallop)? An answer came after Christmas in 2004. Latham, recuperating from the election loss, was silent after the tsunami that killed 228,000 people in 14 countries. After Howard committed $1 billion in relief and declared a national day of mourning, Latham called the disaster, dismissively, “the Asian flood”. He “couldn’t reverse the waves”. Three weeks later, citing life-threatening cancer, Latham quit.

(I’d had some hint of that callousness when, in 2000, I moved into a caravan park in Cabramatta to write about south-western Sydney, an area that generally made only the crime section of mainstream media. Every other elected representative – local and state, Labor, conservative and independent – was eager to help reshape perceptions of a complex and fast-changing area. Latham, the federal member, told me to “f--- off out of here”. I called again to show proof that the Herald’s interest was genuine. He told me to f--- off again.)

Mark Latham and Nathalie Matthews at Randwick Racecourse last year.Credit: James Brickwood

The Latham Diaries, published in 2005, was a candid bestseller, full of insight and humour alongside schoolyard name-calling and bigotry. The loner then drifted through the media (which he’d previously blamed for his 2004 defeat) and back into politics, via the libertarian right through a cascade of fallings-out to where he always belonged, as an independent, not elected as such, but getting eight years on the One Nation ticket. On more than $200,000 of taxpayer money, he is able to send lewd texts from the Legislative Council until 2027.

If this were a political obituary of Mark Latham, it would need another thousand words to list the disputes, the grievances, the usage of “parliamentary privilege” (ha) as a free-fire zone. This week’s allegations by his former partner have not been tested in court; some of them Latham denies, while others are in line with past behaviour which, in a radio interview, he seemed quite proud of.

It was Latham who once derided Tony Abbott’s description of Liberal member Fiona Scott as having “sex appeal”, not because of the underlying misogyny but because it wasn’t misogynistic enough. “I’ve had a good look at Fiona Scott,” Latham said, and Abbott “must have had the beer goggles on because she’s not that good of a sort, and I’d rather have an aspirant for the prime ministership who’s a good judge”. This same blokey bloke said in Wednesday’s interview with Chris Smith, in response to claims that he had sexted his then-partner during a parliamentary sitting, “Sitting there listening to Penny Sharpe droning on, and then a woman who looks like Nathalie Matthews sends you a message, which one would you pay attention to?”

After Latham completed his road from great Labor hope to great Labor embarrassment and purged himself in his diaries, West Australian academic Natalie Mast wrote perceptively that his “view of Labor and what it stands for is a romanticised one. Latham looks back with rose-coloured glasses to mythical glory days.” It was a smart insight into the loner as a disillusioned idealist, craving an imaginary past of charismatic strongmen. In 2025, when the Australian middle has voted for cautious anti-charisma, Latham’s romantic vision of the leader as a macho gunslinger is even more out of step than it was in 2004.

In 2016, Latham was one of the first Australian public figures to take Donald Trump’s presidential ambitions seriously and express a hope that he would win.Credit: Marija Ercegovac

But Latham’s faux-stalgia was not a grotty irrelevance. He was a forerunner of the great global political belch of this decade: the revolt against institutions and process-driven government, the grievance politics of the alienated unrepresented (white) working-class male, and the bitter descent from constructive solutions for post-industrial decay into culture-wars malice.

That resentment becomes a political force when it can rally around a daddy figure. In 2016, Latham was one of the first Australian public figures to take Donald Trump’s presidential ambitions seriously and express a hope that he would win.

But “Trumpism” is only a cult of personality, not a coherent movement. And the Australian middle does not go in for cults. There is no such thing as “Lathamism”. It has no legacy, least of all among Labor voters who want to forget how, in 2004, they were taken in by phony hope.

Malcolm Knox is a regular Herald columnist. His books include Secrets Of The Jury Room.

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