The Latham Diaries

By Mark Latham

Here are the political diaries of one of Australia's most promising national leaders—published within twelve months of his resignation from office—an historic first. The Latham Diaries are searingly honest bulletins from the front line of Labor politics. They provide a unique view into the life of a man, the Party and the nation at a crucial time in Australian history.
Mark Latham resigned from parliament in January 2005, after only fourteen months as Leader of the Opposition, amid bitter post-election recrimination and his own ill health. From the beginning of his career he was viewed by many observers as the ALP's resident intellectual and larrikin, the great hope of a new generation with the drive and talent to become prime minister.
So why did his career end so abruptly? As The Latham Diaries reveal, the rising tide of public cynicism about politics, the cult of celebrity, the dangerous liaison between politics and the media, and the sickness at the heart of the Labor machine all played their part. As did Latham's own errors, as he candidly records in these diaries.
This is a riveting chronicle of life inside politics: the backroom deals, the frontroom conniving, the bitter defeat of idealism and the triumph of opportunism. The Latham Diaries is not just the story of the Labor Party in the last years of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century, but a sobering account of the state of Australian democracy 100 years after Federation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Apr 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780522860641

Mark Latham

Mark Latham is a writer, editor and games designer from Staffordshire, UK. After graduating with an MA in English literature from the University of Sheffield, Mark went on to become the editor of White Dwarf magazine, and then the managing editor of Games Workshop's games development team, before finally becoming a full-time author of novels, short stories and games. A keen amateur historian, Mark is fascinated by the nineteenth century, leading to the production of the popular tabletop games Legends of the Old West, Trafalgar and Waterloo for Warhammer Historical.

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Contents

Foreword

Author’s Note

Acronyms & Abbreviations

Introduction to the third edition

Introduction

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004 Pre-election

2004 Post-election

2005

Epilogue

Appendix 1: Who’s Who in the Factional Zoo (mid-2003)

Appendix 2: Summary of the John Utting/UMR Research Report,

‘Review of Political Environment and Strategic Directions’

References

Notes

Foreword

What the Labor Party has been doing to itself is hardly new. I don’t mean losing elections or leaders or barely hanging on in minority governments (three of Australia’s nine); that is just the normal political cycle at work after a dominant period by one side or the other. What I do mean is Labor’s internal rot in principle, process and people.

While a good many only lately have come to acknowledge the ALP as just another self-absorbed collective of political careerists, those with memories beyond last night’s news bulletins remember Mark Latham unshackling himself twelve years ago after one of Kim Beazley’s senior staffers cut Latham’s education policy to shreds, on the eve of the 1998 election campaign, without telling him.

Latham was Beazley’s education shadow minister at the time, and was livid. But he kept his silence until after the Howard Government had been re-elected, then he unloaded publicly on Beazley, as Labor leader, and the faceless, graceless influences around him.

There were a number of pungent Latham quotes as he instantly removed himself from Beazley’s front bench and went into self-exile on parliament’s backbench for three years. One quote, every bit as valid twelve years later, after the fall of another Labor leader whom Latham once addressed, in an email, as ‘Hey, knucklehead’, was:

There’s a mob there [in the leader’s office] who spend their whole life telling people what they can’t do. And their most effective methodology in saying what you can’t do is to deceive you. They give the impression something will be done and then, when it’s too late, it’s not done. It happened in 1996 and it happened this [campaign]. Well, this little Red Indian’s not copping it any more.

The quote comes from a telephone rant I used in a Saturday column published in The Sydney Morning Herald on 10 October 1998—exactly a week after John Howard’s winning election that gave Australia his ‘never ever’ GST. Five months later, on 13 March 1999, the ‘Little Red Indian’ was no less candid in another Saturday Herald interview after I walked around to his backbencher’s Parliament House office one afternoon with a tape recorder.

Here’s Latham on modern politics:

Campaign professionalism [Latham spoke both words as if hawking phlegm] means MPs getting exactly the same advice, on both sides, from the faction chiefs or the party bosses. You know, ‘This is what you do to hang on to your seat, this is what you say, this is how you act’. We become candidates from central casting, the methods and identities coming together, and you get this dreadful sameness across politics. We’re all just a bunch of suits, so to speak.

… on political passion:

People come into politics, well motivated a lot of them, wanting to do good things for the right reasons, but the performance indicators, if you like, have become very different. The passion is to survive.

… on party factionalism:

It’s a force for sameness. Factional loyalty and toeing the line is the path to promotion, so people willingly join the queue [and] get out of the habit of thinking for themselves. They get the party orders, they get the factional orders, and away they go. It’s bred a lot of this uniformity which is so unhealthy. There’s got to be a bit more room to do creative things and not get knocked over the head by the heavies.

… on Pauline Hanson:

I think there’s a move back in the community to the raw-edged conviction politician. I mean, Pauline Hanson was the clearest example of someone who just cut through all the sophisticated bullshit and went straight to the people. And she hit a raw nerve. Voters now notice when a politician is direct and different after 25 years of this sea of sameness.

… on his future:

I’m pretty happy doing what I’m doing. Writing, thinking, agitating; they’re appropriate enterprises. Besides, I’ve always struggled with the incessant bullshit of politics. You know, being nice to everyone. I’ve never been good at that. You make enough sacrifices in public life without the indignity of having to associate with people you don’t like.

That was almost twelve years ago. Mark Latham was gone from public life six years later, Labor’s factional ‘heavies’ pleased with themselves not to have to ‘associate’ with him further. Latham was never one of theirs, unlike the jellied big man from Perth and the trade union drone from Melbourne. Three leaders in two years, Latham the only one anointed in a contested ballot by his Labor colleagues. And in getting there, on 2 December 2003, to stay for a scant thirteen months, the Little Red Indian of October 1998 defeated the ex-leader he’d walked out on five years earlier. Irony, indeed.

All of which is to say, what?

Simply, that whatever you thought of Mark Latham as a politician and, briefly, an alternative prime minister, he well understood in 1998 what Labor was doing to itself and, later, what it had become by the time Beazley, Crean, himself and Rudd had been thoroughly worked over by the pressures of party political leadership across a span of just fourteen years.

And Latham said so, openly and bluntly, from October 1998 onwards, and he never stopped saying it, either in person or in print, however much his critics rubbished him as ‘bitter and twisted’, though never to his face.

The [Labor] Party’s defining purpose now revolves around power and patronage, the fuel that sustains the factions but that ultimately drains the True Believers of conviction and belief. It has become a conservative institution run by conservative people, the worst elements of machine politics. The problem of social democratic reform in Australia has become insoluble.

From The Latham Diaries (2005)

Latham is still saying so, still ‘writing’ and ‘thinking’, still ‘agitating’ even. His 10 000-word introductory chapter to the first edition of his published Diaries five years ago is as clear, unapologetic and relevant an exposition of Australian politics as you’ll find anywhere, if you’re lucky. The quality of the writing is sustained, with Latham impervious to the fleas of his old party and the shrill cries of the federal press gallery and its satellites. So he should be.

On the eve of just his fiftieth birthday, his life settled, so too his family, Mark Latham surely will continue ‘writing’ and ‘thinking’ for years, I’d imagine. Why? Because he can, fluently and with talent. He was one of the few politicians I knew who wrote his own speeches. He writes books, newspaper articles and magazine essays, all in the same succinct language. He has been scribbling all his adult life, just as he has gone on learning the craft of writing worth reading and the power of the well-written word.

In a review for Spectator Australia of the publishing ‘quickie’ Confessions of a Faceless Man: Inside Campaign 2010, Latham dismembered its self-aggrandising author, the 29-year-old trade union official Paul Howes, with writing like this:

In a speech to the Sydney Institute recently, Howes mentioned the importance of ‘ideas’ no fewer than two dozen times, without hinting what those ideas might be. It was a word used without meaning or context, as a trophy lined up on a mantelpiece of intellectual pretence. Perhaps he believes if he mentions ‘ideas’ enough people will think he has some. It’s a Field of Dreams approach to public life; repeat it and they will come.

It is the same uncompromising language of Latham’s original 10 000-word opening to his Diaries, now re-released. I’ve always liked direct speech, to quote specifics, to the scorn of critics, but there is no written or spoken word more damning than the public record repeated in context. Latham likes to quote, too. In this new edition of Diaries he quotes Julia Gillard as potently as he dealt in his book review with Paul Howes’ self-importance.

Consider Gillard’s climb of the greasy pole. Elected in 1998—the same year Kevin Rudd arrived in Canberra—she first served as a shadow minister under Simon Crean’s leadership from November 2001. After Crean stepped down an electoral basket case two years later, Gillard passed to Mark Latham’s front bench from November 2003, then on to Kim Beazley’s recycled front bench in January 2005 after Latham walked out, hounded by Labor’s white ants. Then, when Kevin Rudd ousted Beazley in a ballot in November 2006, Gillard was on Rudd’s ticket as deputy leader. A year later she was Deputy Prime Minister, then Prime Minister two and a half years after that, following the defeat, under Rudd’s leadership, of the Howard Government.

Along the way, however, while manoeuvring past five successive Labor leaders in twelve years, Julia Gillard was politically gauche enough to write an article on Labor’s ‘factions and fractions’ which The Sydney Morning Herald published in March 2006. It reminds us she can be such a thorough humbug when it suits, politically.

Australia’s first woman Prime Minister—put into office by ‘the destructive problem’ of the same factional ‘cancer’ she professed to despise, in March 2006, as ‘eating away at the very fabric’ of the Labor Party—will squirm at being confronted by the extent of her hypocrisy almost five years later. Latham has unearthed the relevant Sydney Morning Herald article, under Julia Gillard’s by-line, and he quotes and comments in detail. He does not spare her.

In September 2000, just before the Sydney Olympics, the always quotable Gough Whitlam gave a speech at a Sydney farewell dinner for Bob Carr’s former attorney-general, Jeff Shaw, QC, who would die of pneumonia a decade later. During his remarks, Whitlam reflected, in passing, on the South Australian Catholic trade union heavyweight Joseph de Bruyn as ‘a Dutchman who hates dykes’.

I commented in the Herald at the time:

Perhaps only Whitlam would say such a thing out loud. Certainly, you’d have to think, only he could get away with it. Whitlam is and has been for years, the wasp on Labor’s wall, in the same way he often behaves as its self-appointed conscience. As he chided Kim Beazley [still federal leader at the time] a month ago: ‘Labor’s 1998 national conference was so intent on avoiding recrimination that it produced no policies’.

Whitlam is now in his ninety-fifth year. We hear almost nothing of him speaking or writing anywhere these days. Mark Latham, a Whitlam protégé of the 1980s and later MP for his Sydney seat, is now the wasp on Labor’s wall. Like it or not, the Labor Party better get used to it.

Alan Ramsey

Canberra, 1 December 2010

Author’s Note

One of the challenges in publishing a political diary is to make it as reader-friendly as possible. Because my Diaries were not originally written for publication, the entries assumed a familiarity with the people, politics and issues of the day. Annotations have been provided to assist readers with any shorthand I may have used and to provide background information. The career details of politicians are provided as at the time of the diary entry. As their political roles and titles change, the information is updated in subsequent annotations.

My thanks to the staff of Melbourne University Publishing for their assistance in the preparation of this book. The head of MUP, Louise Adler, had great faith in this project and readily accepted the risks in publishing material of this kind. I hope future historians and students of Australian politics will be grateful for her courage in deciding that university publishing houses can legitimately publish accounts of the lively debates and controversies of the nation. Polemical books have a fine tradition in university life, and I thank Louise for keeping this tradition alive.

I also wish to thank my literary agent, Mary Cunnane, for her commitment to this project. Without her guidance and encouragement, I may not have seen it through to publication. She has provided valuable advice at all times, helping me manage this task without neglecting my responsibilities at home.

Inevitably, there are some errors of omission and judgement in a political diary. If I could, and with the benefit of hindsight, I would have expressed myself differently or made different political points. But to do so would sacrifice the immediacy and authenticity of this record. I trust that readers will understand the circumstances in which mistakes and misjudgements have been made. Most of the diary entries were made during busy periods of work and travel, not the most conducive conditions for writing a book. For the political diarist, however, there is no alternative. All errors and omissions are mine.

Acronyms & Abbreviations

2PP two-party-preferred

ABA Australian Broadcasting Authority

ABC Australian Broadcasting Corporation

ACOSS Australian Council of Social Services

ACT Australian Capital Territory

ACTU Australian Council of Trade Unions

AFL Australian Football League

AFR Australian Financial Review; also referred to as Fin Review

AHA Australian Hotels Association

ALP Australian Labor Party

AMA Australian Medical Association

AMWU Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union

APEC Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation

ASIO Australian Secret Intelligence Organisation

AWA Australian Workplace Agreement

AWU Australian Workers’ Union

BCA Business Council of Australia

CAD current account deficit

CAN Community Action Network

CFMEU Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union

CIA Central Intelligence Agency

COAG Council of Australian Governments

CPA Commonwealth Parliamentary Association

CPO Commonwealth Parliamentary Offices

CSHA Commonwealth–State Housing Agreement

CV curriculum vitae

Dem. Democrat (Party)

DLP Democratic Labor Party

EMTR effective marginal tax rates

FEC Federal Electorate Council (ALP)

FIP Families in Partnership

FPLP Federal Parliamentary Labor Party

FTA Free Trade Agreement

GDP gross domestic product

GG Governor-General

govt government

GST goods and services tax

HECS Higher Education Contribution Scheme

IOC International Olympic Committee

IR industrial relations

Lib. Liberal Party

MAD mutually assured destruction

min. minister

MLC Member of the Legislative Council

MOB Manager of Opposition Business

MP Member of Parliament

MPI Matter of Public Importance

MUA Maritime Union of Australia

Nat. Exec. National Executive (of the Labor Party)

NCC National Civic Council

NESB non-English speaking background

NP National Party

NSW New South Wales

NT Northern Territory

Parl. Parliament

PAYE pay as you earn

PBS Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme

PM Prime Minister

PRC Priorities Review Committee

Pres. President

PWC PriceWaterhouseCoopers

Qld Queensland

RAAF Royal Australian Air Force

RBA Reserve Bank of Australia

REDO Regional Economic Development Organisation

RSL Returned Services League

SA South Australia

SCG Sydney Cricket Ground

SDA Shop Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association

Sen. Senator

SES socioeconomic status

SMH Sydney Morning Herald

STD Subscriber Trunk Dialling

TA travel allowance

TAFE Technical and Further Education

Tas. Tasmania

TCF textile, clothing and footwear

TPV Temporary Protection Visa

Treas. Treasurer

UAP United Australia Party

UN United Nations

UNESCO United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization

Vic. Victoria

WA Western Australia

WMD Weapons of Mass Destruction

Introduction to the

third edition

A curious feature of Labor politics is its attitude to freedom of speech. When a factional boss speaks out against the party line, he usually promotes it as an overdue outbreak of candour and creativity. When someone else does it, however, it is condemned as a betrayal of party solidarity.

I was reminded of this process recently when the head of the Australian Workers’ Union, Paul Howes, launched his book on the 2010 federal election campaign, Confessions of a Faceless Man. Writing in The Sunday Telegraph to promote his work, Howes said he thought it was

important for the Labor Party and the wider labour movement to be more open to different ideas and opinions. One of Labor’s greatest failings since winning office in 2007 has been the lack of open debate about new ideas for the century and the lack of tolerance for different ideas.

Howes complained of how the former prime minister Kevin Rudd had left colleagues ‘brutalised’ if they disagreed with him. He claimed to be ‘mortified’, for instance, when Rudd ‘slapped [him] down in a very public way during Question Time’ on asylum seeker policy. ‘That is not how democracy works’, Howes protested. ‘The party became increasingly closed and those in the wider labour movement who spoke out or disagreed on policy issues were marginalised and shut up.’ This, we are told, is the reason why he and the other faceless men moved against Rudd and installed the more compliant Julia Gillard.

Since my retirement from parliament in January 2005, I have tried to advance different ideas about Labor’s future, most notably in my diaries published in September that year. During the recent election campaign I had an opportunity to present a dissenting opinion as a guest reporter for the 60 Minutes program. My charter was to go behind the scenes of the stage-managed campaign, to ask some extemporaneous questions of the party leaders (given that Gillard and Tony Abbott had rejected requests for interviews) and to offer an insight into the asinine nature of modern politics—the problem identified by Howes in his Sunday Telegraph article. There was a time, of course, when this robust style of reporting was known as journalism.

Two Saturdays before the election I broke the flow of Gillard’s artificially constructed campaign event at the agricultural show in Brisbane by putting unscripted questions to her. This is how Howes, sitting in his home in Sydney, watching the TV news that night, responded:

I yell at the screen, hoping that some magical force will alert the Federal Police officers guarding the PM to my screams of ‘Take him out, take him out!’ I would have given good money to see Mark Latham tasered.

Putting aside the strangeness of someone screaming at their television, trying to conjure magical powers well after an event has occurred, this statement exposes Howes’ true attitude to dissent. As a young man he was a Trotskyist railing against the coercive powers of the state. As a prominent trade union official he claims to be against political brutality and the silencing of democratic debate. Now, in a book of confessions, he has advocated a bizarre abuse of police powers in relation to a democratic exchange of views in a public place 750 kilometres away, his knowledge of which was restricted to electronic images displayed on his TV screen.

Maybe if it was just Howes, the weird lingering hypocrisy of his stance could be ignored. But there’s more. On the Saturday prior to polling day, The Sydney Morning Herald reported that a senior Labor official wanted

to drive right into the former Labor leader. ‘If I see Latham on the street, I’m going to run him over’ [he said].

At one level, this nonsense says something about the decline of Labor’s culture. A party founded on the support of strong, self-reliant working-class men is now run by snivelling types who, rather than confronting me man-to-man, want police tasers and automobiles to fight their battles for them.

In another respect, their bluster is meaningless. Whatever I have done in upsetting the Labor machine is insignificant compared to Rudd’s actions in sabotaging its 2010 election campaign with a series of strategically placed leaks. And his punishment? Promotion from the backbench to a seat at the Labor Cabinet table as Foreign Minister.

Machine Politics

In practice, the factional bosses follow an authoritarian style of politics. They need to be able to keep their underlings in line and exercise tight control of their numbers inside the party. Any breach of this discipline undermines their power and legitimacy. Factional members who exercise freedom of speech and independent decision-making face permanent retribution. For someone like Howes, the double standard is clear: as an AWU factional leader, he speaks out publicly and seeks to influence the Labor Caucus so as to impress his members, while simultaneously denying others the right to voice a contrary point of view.

This is why the factions find my role as a former party leader so incendiary. Speaking from experience at the highest level of the organisation, I have provided a pointed assessment of the faults and challenges facing modern Labor. I cannot be disciplined or silenced, so the factional bosses, desperate to exercise control, have tried to weaken my credibility through attacks on my character. Sometimes, their frustrations have spilled over into boyish threats of tasering and car-ramming.

As with my role in the election campaign, the publication of The Latham Diaries provoked hostility and calls for censorship. It was regarded as an affront to Labor, simply because it told the truth about the internal workings of the party. It was received with outrage by the commercial media, simply because it dared to criticise the ethics and methods of reporters. In many cases, the journalists and politicians attacking the book had not even read it. For them, it was bad enough that someone had broken ranks from the Canberra Club and published a firsthand, diarised account of how they go about their work. I was widely denounced as a class-traitor by the political class in this country.

Hindsight reveals a curious thing about this reaction. Five years later, many of the points first made in the diaries are now commonplace in critiques of the ALP. The party is widely seen as lacking core beliefs and purpose, overrun by factionalism and focus groups. Howes himself has spoken persuasively about Labor’s identity crisis, saying it is

hard to know what we stand for. It’s hard to know what we’re trying to achieve. What is the great next big step for a social democratic progressive party in this country?

Yet still, I am portrayed as an unreliable, even erratic source. The political class has accepted the message of The Latham Diaries but not the messenger.

It is difficult to see how Labor can overcome its crisis of identity and purpose. The institutional settings are against it. Due to extreme levels of public apathy and media derision, party politics in Australia has hollowed out. Without a sound base of public participation, control of the party organisations has fallen into the hands of a small number of machine men. This problem is particularly severe in the ALP, due to the loss of trade union membership and working-class activism over the past thirty years.

In practice, Labor has become a virtual party. Its local branches are riddled with ethnic stacking—the improper deals by which ethnic community leaders recruit people to the ALP (for the benefit of a particular faction) and in return, Labor MPs assist them with grants and migration applications. The trade unions play a similar role, supplying money, personnel and patronage to the various factional and sub-factional leaders. Howes’ AWU faction, for instance, controls a band of Caucus members, the most prominent of which is the Treasurer, Wayne Swan.

This process has led to the Balkanisation of Labor, or what Gillard once described as ‘a federation of fiefdoms’. Writing in The Sydney Morning Herald in March 2006, she summarised the state of the party as follows:

Factionalism is out of control and destructive. Indeed, we are no longer talking about factionalism, we are talking about fractionalism—a party in which almost anyone with a pocketful of votes, often procured in dubious circumstances, believes it is their right to demand something from the party in return … The factions and fractions are a cancer eating away at the very fabric of the party and everybody knows it. We need to stop pretending the problem will go away without treatment.

Unhappily, Gillard is now at the centre of this pretence, having obtained the prime ministership through the power of fractionalism. She is the titular head of the federation of fiefdoms, owing her position to the machine men who rolled Rudd. This is one of the reasons she has been so ineffective as Prime Minister.

Once someone becomes beholden to the fractions, they become paralysed politically. There are so many sub-factions, each with competing agendas and interests, that it is impossible—in the making of reformist policies normally associated with left-of-centre parties—to keep them satisfied. The result is the politics of the lowest common denominator: a blancmange of a government in which Gillard carefully calibrates her actions so as not to offend the likes of Mark Arbib, David Feeney, Bill Shorten, Don Farrell, Mark Butler, Penny Wong, Stephen Smith, Nick Sherry, John Faulkner, the Ferguson brothers and dozens of other fractional leaders. She now leads a government of defensive inertia, a difficulty worsened by the circumstances of a hung parliament in which she also needs to pander to the independents and The Greens.

Some commentators thought that my diaries overstated the extent of Labor’s internal disputes and maliciousness. Such is the arrogance of the Canberra press gallery, it thought it knew more about how the party operates than someone who had actually led it. The coup against Rudd and his retaliatory leaks during the election campaign confirmed the core elements of my analysis. The standard operating technique of the Labor movement is self-interested viciousness.

This is the curse of centre-left parties around the world. While they preach the values of fairness and compassion, their daily work and treatment of their so-called colleagues is antipathetic to these goals. How can the ALP create a just and caring Australian society if it lives by the values of distrust and spite within its own forums? For this and other reasons, set out in the introduction to my diaries, the social democratic project is insoluble.

While there is no shortage of Labor figures willing to talk about the need for organisational reform, in practice, the party is beyond repair, beyond reform. By their nature, the factional warlords who control the ALP will never surrender their power. But even if they did, even if a radical program to democratise the party was implemented, the crippling level of public apathy in Australia would render the reforms meaningless. Few people care enough about organised politics to sacrifice their time and become dedicated activists. Whether we like it or not, mass parties have gone the way of the dinosaur. All the talk and bluster about Labor reform will remain just that: political rhetoric unsupported by results.

In recent elections, a growing number of voters have turned to The Greens as a left-wing alternative to the ALP. In large part, this reflects disillusionment with Labor’s capitulation on the vital issue of climate change. The party’s affiliated unions and factions are a permanent roadblock to policies which place the environment ahead of the interests of the mining and forestry industries.

Over time, global warming will force structural changes to the way in which Western societies and their economies are organised. In effect, nature will force humankind to move beyond carbon-dependent capitalism and its values of materialism and consumerism. It will force the creation of ecologically sustainable means of production, distribution and exchange. The future of Australian politics lies with the green movement, not the Labor movement.

I deliberately use the term ‘green movement’ rather than The Greens party. By their nature, political parties attract authoritarian types of people, those comfortable with top-down models of control, with themselves positioned at the top. The Greens are no exception. In many respects, they are a mirror image of the One Nation Party—one dominated by the authoritarian Left, the other infested by the fascist Right. Just as One Nation fell apart under these organisational pressures (attracting many hundreds of members who envisaged themselves as the Führer), The Greens are likely to face chronic instability once their long-serving leader, Bob Brown, retires from parliament.

Most likely, the green movement will follow a dispersed model of power, one in which a majority of non-political citizens are forced to take action against climate change in their own lifestyles and work environment. This will occur regardless of the power structures of parliament and its ruling parties, whether they originate from the old left, centre or right of organised politics. Climate change is such a transformational issue that it will change forever the nature of democracy.

Media Politics

In the introduction to the hardcover edition of this book I argued that, as a way of understanding public life, political diaries are more valuable than political journalism. A diarist has the advantage of chronicling events as they happen, whereas journalists try to reconstruct them, inevitably relying on second- and thirdhand sources of information. This tends to make their work highly subjective and error-prone.

Following their release, my diaries were subject to sustained criticism in the Australian media. Without exception, the extent of the criticism was in direct proportion to the number of times the media companies and commentators were mentioned in the diaries. Even today, journalists write about me through the prism of how I wrote about them in my book.

A stunning aspect of this coverage has been the frequency of factual errors. One thing I learned in the recent election campaign was that, compared to the demands of a parliamentary career, the expertise required for competent journalism is rudimentary. It involves nothing more complex than attention to detail and basic research and communication skills. It is amazing, therefore, that so many journalists make so many mistakes. I offer two examples of this phenomenon.

The self-appointed guardian of media accuracy in Australia is Gerard Henderson, from the Sydney Institute and The Sydney Morning Herald. In his column in the Herald on 21 March 2006, he claimed that my diary entry for 9 January 2002 was not genuine. As readers of this book will know, I did not make a diary entry for 9 January 2002. For someone who has made a career from exposing other people’s errors, Henderson makes an extraordinary number of false claims himself.

It gets worse. In the Herald in June 2008, Henderson opined that, ‘in 2003, the Labor Leader Kim Beazley made it clear the Opposition opposed the Howard Government’s decision to join the coalition of the willing in invading Iraq’. Labor’s leader in early 2003, of course, was Simon Crean. Diary entries that do not exist, mixing up his Labor leaders—this is the standard set by the pedantic guardian of the press.

Indeed, a culture of inaccuracy is embedded in the Australia media, sometimes brazenly so. In my diary entry for 27 November 2004, I dealt with the errors contained in an article written by Christine Jackman and Cameron Stewart in The Australian—in particular, their claim that I cancelled a family BBQ in Sydney on the last Saturday of the 2004 election campaign. On 30 November, in the adjournment debate in the House of Representatives, the Member for Lowe, John Murphy, confirmed the nature of the mistake. He outlined, in irrefutable detail, the sequence of events:

Last Saturday [The Australian] carried a story entitled ‘Losing it’, which purported to be a ‘definitive account’ of how Mark Latham lost the 2004 federal election. It opened with a claim that during the federal election the Leader of the Opposition cancelled a barbecue for families that was planned for the seat of Parramatta and went elsewhere that day to make an announcement. The first point I make to the House tonight is that this claim is false. I have spoken with a number of people from my electorate who attended the barbecue and who spoke with Mr Latham.

Today’s edition of The Australian carries a letter of response from Mr Latham’s office. This letter also proves the claim to be wrong on at least seven grounds: (1) the Leader of the Opposition attended the function as planned; (2) he was greeted by more than 200 guests; (3) he spoke to the crowd for more than 15 minutes about Labor’s plan to ease the squeeze on families; (4) the Leader of the Opposition made his announcement there, and not elsewhere as claimed in the story; (5) more than 20 journalists attended the function; (6) radio news bulletins that day, and television news bulletins that night, carried coverage of Mr Latham being there; and (7) the Sun-Herald carried a report on the following day that said the announcement was ‘unveiled at a community barbecue at Wentworthville in the marginal Coalition-held seat of Parramatta’.

In other words, a simple check of the public record would have prevented the mistake made by the journalists involved in last Saturday’s article. And yet, operating in complete denial, The Australian today carries an editor’s note still insisting that Mr Latham ditched the plan and failed to participate as scheduled. When a newspaper, presented with clear and publicly available evidence, cannot acknowledge that it has made a mistake, it demonstrates arrogance and a cavalier attitude to the need to uphold the basic standards of journalism … What on earth is going on at The Australian?

This is what was going on: for their efforts, Jackman and Stewart were given a ‘Quill Award’ by the Melbourne Press Club for the category ‘Best Feature in Print’ in 2004. Error-ridden journalism was judged to be award-winning journalism. Even worse, Jackman and Stewart accepted the award. It is hard to imagine a greater abuse of professional standards: stepping on stage to accept a prize for journalistic excellence concerning a story they knew to be false. In truth, the Australian media knows no shame.

Incongruously enough, one of the media’s objections to my diaries was that they published the details of private conversations. The neo-conservative commentator Andrew Bolt, as recently as last month, argued that the former newspaper editor Bruce Guthrie had acted unethically in writing a book that blew the whistle on the internal workings of News Limited. He linked me to Guthrie and this ‘journalist sin’, maintaining that:

Mark Latham, the former Labor leader, has been the most spectacular exemplar of this form, betraying in The Latham Diaries so many of his own colleagues’ confidences, but at least he earned the scorn of many journalists.

I don’t know which newspapers Bolt reads, but apparently they are ones in which journalists do not publish the details of private conversations. Bolt has lost touch with reality: most of the efforts and energy of members of the press gallery are devoted to finding out what politicians have said to each other in confidence and then publishing this as news. The News Limited papers, for which Bolt works, are full of it.

This point was confirmed in 2005 by the release of two other books on ALP politics: Losing It: the Inside Story of the Labor Party in Opposition, by Annabel Crabb, and Loner: Inside a Labor Tragedy, by Bernard Lagan—both long-serving press gallery journalists. In the introduction to her work, Crabb describes herself as writing a ‘political gossip column’, an apt summary of the book’s style and contents. It is a collection of bar room rumours and innuendo about federal politicians, directed mostly at me.

The Crabb book is also significant for the large number of Labor MPs and officials who contributed information, mostly off the record. No less than a dozen shadow ministers had their say, plus scores of other Labor figures. This exposes the hypocrisy of the media critics who said that I should not have recorded behind-the-scenes information about the ALP in my diaries. In the hypocritical world of the mass media, politicians are actively encouraged to brief journalists with confidential information, yet when a politician bypasses the media and publishes his own detailed account of events, this is condemned as unethical.

The difference is that I put my name to my words. I am happy to be associated publicly with the things I have to say—a natural way of communicating. Unlike Kevin Rudd during the election campaign, I do not call Laurie Oakes with snippets of information, the broadcasting of which is conditional on anonymity. This is the way of the sneak, the politician who wishes to cause someone else damage but is not man enough to be accountable for his actions. The likes of Oakes, of course, are willing to facilitate this debilitating culture. It is a soft and lazy style of journalism, allowing public figures to cause mischief without ever holding them responsible for their personal agendas and malice. Typically, in any Oakes newspaper column or television broadcast, the public receives more ‘information’ off the record than on it.

This problem has become a regular part of federal politics. In fact, looking back on the contents of the Crabb and Lagan books, if I had not kept a diary I would have had to write my memoirs from scratch, correcting the misrepresentations of my former colleagues. As it stands, I am glad I maintained a diary during my time in federal parliament. It was an effective way of putting accurate information on the public record, with the added novelty (by Canberra’s standards) of publishing my views under my own name.

Political History

My main objection to the Lagan book was its failure to include important information about the 2004 election campaign, material that would have verified my position on two contentious issues; that is, the formulation of Labor’s Tasmanian forestry policy and the failure of our paid-advertising campaign to counter the Liberals’ interest rate scare. On both matters, the facts deserve to be known, so I have included this information here. It may be of some use to political historians.

After I retired from parliament in January 2005, I exchanged a series of emails with Lagan, fulfilling an earlier commitment to cooperate with his research. For reasons only he can provide, he failed to include the key material in his book. Three emails are relevant. First, on the Tasmanian forests policy, Lagan informed me on 6 March that:

I had a chat to Tim Gartrell this week. He was anxious to make clear to me that he and the State [ALP] Secretaries took full responsibility for the decision to head to Tassie late in the campaign to announce the forests policy. He told me that about three weeks before the Tassie trip, he and the State Secretaries had met and decided it must be done. They were gung-ho for the policy and wanted it out. This is important new information for me and will certainly go into the book because it shows strong support at the top of the Party for the forests policy.

Second, on the interest rate advertising, Lagan’s email of 6 March said that:

Gartrell was at pains to make clear that he thought the Pam Williams story [in The Australian Financial Review in February 2004] was dead wrong on the stuff about you refusing to do an interest rate ad [rebutting the Liberals’ scare campaign].

Third, again on the interest rate advertising, Lagan emailed me on 2 April to say that:

Just so you know, I am well aware it took [ALP] campaign headquarters until September’s end to produce a rather weak interest rate inoculation ad. The explanation for this—that test ads didn’t work—fails to answer one question. If they so cleverly anticipated the interest rate scare campaign, as they claim, how come it took to the death knell to produce one lousy ad? Surely they could have tested interest rate inoculation ads well before the campaign.

Conclusion

Judging from the feedback on this book, young Australians have been particularly interested in its contents. They often get involved in politics while still naïve and dewy-eyed about the system. Hopefully my experience has helped them to better understand the nature of Australia’s political culture. It is a rotten lifestyle and a poisonous work environment. No rational, clear-sighted person would invite the voyeurism of the media or the viciousness of the machine men into their life. The political class hate me saying it, but young people should avoid organised politics and pursue other, more productive ways of contributing to society.

The major social problems facing Australia—such as mental illness, loneliness, domestic violence, child abuse and poor Aboriginal health—have their origins in the relationships between people. They are primarily lifestyle and community issues, not economic problems. While governments and organised politics are reasonably skilled in the creation of material wealth, they have little influence on the creation of social capital. This is why, despite decades of effort and billions of dollars of public expenditure, governments (not just in Australia but across the Western world) have been unable to solve these problems. If anything, they are getting worse.

Most politicians and commentators mistakenly believe politics has an unlimited capacity to solve social problems, that the answers lie in a change in public administration and new pieces of legislation and government spending. In practice, however, people do not live their lives by parliamentary statutes or departmental programs. They live them through relationships, in the family and community bonds that surround them. The values that sustain these relationships—such as cooperation, mutual respect and emotional support—are very different to the values of modern politics.

This is one of the reasons why governments struggle to solve community problems. It is impossible to create a better society when the culture of organised politics brings out the worst instincts in people, basing its relationships on retribution and opportunism. Social problems demand social solutions, not the poison of machine politics. The most effective contribution people can make to public life is at the community level: in rebuilding social capital, improving their neighbourhood, joining social and environmental movements and helping local charities and sporting organisations. The foundations of a good society do not lie in the ruthlessness of party politics or in the voyeurism of the mass media.

Mark Latham

November 2010

Introduction

Diaries are rare in Australian politics, too rare. In understanding political events, the Australian public depends heavily on journalists, people who can never go behind the scenes and provide a first-hand account of the political process. By its nature, their work is derivative, relying on other sources of information and second- and third-hand interpretations. This has weakened the reliability of the public record. The electorate has had little exposure to the other side of public life, to what happens behind the newspaper headlines, behind the political spin and manipulation of the daily news cycle.

This book aims to overcome this deficiency. It is a fly-on-the-wall record of my eleven years in the Australian Parliament, including my fourteen months as Leader of the Australian Labor Party (ALP). It offers a first-hand perspective on the state of our democracy, a contemporaneous record of events inside a major parliamentary party. A diary can go places that the media or historians can never see, and it does so with a striking immediacy, free from revisionism and party political censorship.

Last year, I used to call my community forums ‘democracy in the raw’. These diaries are very much politics in the raw. Most people who write books after they leave Parliament offer sanitised versions of events to the public. They are still part of the system, one compromised foot on the gravy train, hoping for appointments and other forms of largesse. It is not in their interests to be frank about the nature of the political system.

I have no interest in the gravy train, in placating the Labor movement as a trade-off for future political patronage. Nor have I been intimidated by the threat of repercussions if I speak my mind and publish my observations as a Labor MP. I kept this diary as an uncut commentary on the culture of Australian politics, especially Labor politics, and I offer it to the reader in that form. It is a very raw document, a record of events as I saw them, unaffected by the niceties and party posturing of the day.

When I first went to Canberra, I noticed that Senator Stephen Loosley took notes and kept a diary at Caucus meetings. I decided to adopt a similar practice, to record significant policy debates, humorous episodes and landmarks in my parliamentary career. It was never a daily diary but, rather, an attempt to capture important events and conversations, items that would one day assist in the writing of Labor history.

I never announced publicly that I was keeping an occasional diary. Some of my parliamentary colleagues knew about it, but by and large, I saw it as a personal project—my safe haven away from the public spotlight in which I could record my thoughts and observations. So I kept my head down, literally, and maintained a regular pattern of entries.

Sometimes there would be a flurry of writing, such as after the 2004 election campaign, when it was important to diarise my efforts and thoughts about a major political event. I had more time available to me than earlier in the year, so I took advantage of it. These entries evolved into a detailed account of the post-election fallout within the ALP and the events leading to my resignation from Parliament in January 2005.

This was an opportunity to write at length about Labor politics and Australian society, and the result is rather like a series of essays. I thought it was important to reflect extensively on my experiences as Leader of the Opposition and diarise my conclusions. I regard this as the most significant part of the book, as it outlines the intractable problems facing the ALP and social democracy in this country.

On other occasions, the diary would run dry, such as in mid-1994 when I was preoccupied with testicular cancer. I was fighting for my life rather than writing about it. Generally, however, I was able to produce a steady flow of material throughout my time in Parliament. I wanted to chronicle my personal experience in politics, rather than repeat things that were being dealt with extensively on the public record. So, for instance, the diaries do not comment on September 11 because there was nothing I could usefully add to the blanket coverage provided by the US media conglomerates.

My style was to take down notes as things happened and write up the diary in full later, usually within a week. For the publication of this book, I transcribed these hand-written entries into the computer. Some entries have since been modified to protect the privacy and reputation of certain individuals. Otherwise, the original entries have been preserved.

I believe it was wise to maintain an occasional diary rather than a daily record. Given the time pressures of political life, daily diaries tend to provide only a basic sketch of events, with little scope for reflection and analysis. They can be quite tedious, as the author is obliged to record something every day, even when the days are mind-numbingly boring. Politicians always say that their work is interesting and relevant, but often this is a façade that hides what they really think about their schedules and the grindstone of public engagements.

Occasional diaries overcome this problem, instead allowing the author to chronicle the most important events and analyse them in greater depth. This is what authors such as Frank Moorhouse have called a ‘discontinuous narrative’, writing that lacks the flow of a daily record but compensates with its intensity and a sense of colour and movement. I experienced a fair bit of colour and movement during my time in Parliament and I hope it is captured in these pages.

When I left politics, I started to think about the Diaries’ future use and readership. I decided to publish it this year for two important reasons. First, after the 2004 election, many Labor MPs and Party officials offered their views and analyses of the conduct of our campaign in background briefings to the media. This practice continued even after I had retired from Parliament. It would be extraordinary, having maintained this record and diarised so many events over eleven years, if I did not contribute to the historical record. I grew up with a love of Labor history, enchanted by the big characters and mystique of the movement. It is time to add my chapter to the story.

Second, for many years I have been a strong critic of the Australian media, objecting to the shallowness and inaccuracy of their reporting. In many cases, it is not actually reporting but a series of personal agendas and prejudices dressed up as journalism. The Diaries offer a countervailing view of events, and a critique of the media’s role in public life. I believe that dissenting voices are important in a democracy, and the Diaries are a chance for mine to be heard.

In practice, journalists only ever see a small fraction of what happens in politics. Often they believe they have captured ‘inside’ information and stories when politicians give them off-the-record briefings. Yet when MPs are not willing to put their names to material, it is a sure sign that they are manipulating the media for their own advantage. Invariably, the public receives a jaundiced account of events. It is a measure of how badly the system has deteriorated that many journalists now report more off-the-record material than on-the-record. A political diary closes the gap between the public’s knowledge and the private reality of Australian politics.

The Diaries focus primarily on the internal workings of Federal Labor, and show a political machine in action. During my time in Parliament, I wrote books and articles to outline my views on national policy issues and debates. I used Parliament itself to review and criticise the performance of the Liberal and National Parties and their fellow travellers in the media.

The Diaries gave me an outlet to record the things I couldn’t say publicly about Labor Party politics then. They dealt with my hopes and frustrations, sometimes through the prism of personalities, but always with an eye on the big policy debates and revitalisation of social democracy in this country.

The entries cover the six phases of my parliamentary career:

• my work as a newly elected backbencher in the Keating Government, as our electoral prospects faded away, culminating in Labor’s heavy defeat in March 1996

• my disappointment and despair as one of Kim Beazley’s Shadow Ministers (1996–98), which resulted in my decision to go to the backbench after the 1998 election

• the freedom and frustrations of the Opposition backbench (1998–2001), a period in which I wrote and argued extensively for a new policy direction for Labor

• my return to the frontbench under Simon Crean’s leadership (2001–03), during which I tried to re-establish my position inside Caucus and defend Crean against the worst elements of machine politics

• my election to the Labor leadership in December 2003 and the long, gruelling ten-month campaign leading up to the October 2004 Federal election

• the events after our election defeat, the upheaval inside the Labor Party and my resignation from Parliament.

My aim is not to rewrite my place in Australian political history. That is not possible. I never became a minister in a Labor Government. Under my leadership, the ALP lost seats at the 2004 Federal election. This disappointed many of my supporters, dashing their expectations of what I could achieve in public life. I failed in my mission to advance the cause of Labor, to make Australia a social democracy. By the conventional performance measures of Australian politics, my parliamentary career was unsuccessful.

Rather, the Diaries tell my story, as it happened. Readers will find within these pages incidents that reflect poorly on other people. They will also find things that reflect poorly on me, decisions and events that I regret. This is not unusual in party politics. It’s a rollercoaster ride, with cycles of success and failure, circumstances that are never ideal, careers that are always imperfect.

In my case, however, the peaks and troughs seemed to be more extreme, especially during my time as Leader. In early 2004, I was able to give the True Believers hope, and even the expectation of an election victory against the odds. By year’s end, things had turned to seed. Some terrible things happened in the aftermath of our election loss last year, incidents that broke my faith in the cause of Labor.

This was not the first period, however, in which I was disenchanted with the ALP. It is a recurring theme in the Diaries, something that gathered force over time, reaching its nadir at the end of 2004. When I again fell ill with pancreatitis, I could see no reason to remain in Labor politics. My decision to leave was based on observations and conclusions that have built up over many years.

I no longer regard Labor as a viable force for social justice in this country. Its massive cultural and structural problems are insoluble. While the Labor machine is still capable of winning elections, it will not deliver on its original purpose for a fair society. I do not say these things lightly—they are based on my personal experiences and deep reflection about the Party’s future. In many respects, the Diaries chart my journey to disillusionment with the ALP.

Machine Politics

Bismarck once declared there are two things the public should never see: the making of sausages and the making of laws. I have breached the second half of his decree. I know many politicians sit in Parliament House thinking to themselves, if only the electorate knew what really goes on here. I used to be one of them. That’s why I kept a diary, so that when the time was right, I could offer the public a peek inside.

The view provided by the Diaries is frightening. It reveals a poisonous and opportunistic Labor culture in which the politics of personal destruction is commonplace. I am not overstating the bleakness of my experience. Politically, it was a Dickensian environment. As Jennie George wrote to me after my resignation, ‘Politics is a brutal business. I thought the union movement was tough, but this was no comparison to the internal dysfunctional culture of the ALP’.1

‘Brutal’ and ‘dysfunctional’ are apt descriptions of the way in which the Labor Caucus operates. Political methods of this kind, however, should be antipathetic to a social democratic organisation, a so-called party of compassion. But they have become a way of life inside the ALP. It gives me no joy to say these things and I can assure readers that they were even less enjoyable to experience.

I always expected our political opponents to play it hard, and from time to time, I gave as good as I got. I’m not proud of that but I saw it as a way of surviving the fight against the Tories. What I never anticipated, and still do not accept, is the way in which some Labor MPs saved their dirtiest and most personal attacks for those inside the Party. On any given day, dozens of Labor politicians would be on the phone gossiping, plotting and spreading rumours about their so-called colleagues. Nothing was off-limits. Personal and private matters were seen as fair game, and were often used to hound the vulnerable into submission.

My experience with the Labor politics of smear and personal destruction was sickening. In June 2000 it had tragic consequences when my friend, Greg Wilton, the Member for Isaacs, killed himself. I believe that Greg’s opponents inside the Party set out to denigrate and pressure him, a