Political Corrections

with Mungo MacCallum

Labor's pain spreads beyond Latham's pancreas

In spite of all the soul-searching, breast-beating and head-scratching over Mark Latham's leadership of the Labor Party, the reality is depressingly simple.

Either he was too ill to do the job - in which case he had to resign; or he just didn't understand what the job involves - in which case he had to be replaced.

Whatever hopes might have been held that he could somehow recover the ground he had lost in the last month were completely blown away by the belated statement he issued last week. As I have commented elsewhere, it was both dismissive and contemptuous - more like a suicide note than a defence.

It contained neither an explanation of his behaviour nor an apology for it. Even those colleagues who have spent the last few weeks making excuses for his disappearance since Christmas were fed up. The question was no longer whether he would go; it was only a matter of when.

For many reasons this is an unhappy conclusion and a lousy outcome. Latham's passion and intellect promised so much; with all his flaws, he genuinely seemed to represent the generational change the party has been seeking since the departure of Paul Keating. The election result, for which he was only partly responsible, was a disappointment and a setback, but it need not have been terminal. Many hoped and believed that he would emerge from it wiser and stronger, particularly in the skills of leadership.

But alas, it was not to be. From his mishandling of the shadow ministry, through his silence over the tsunami to the arrogance of the eventual press release, the last three months have been a constant series of affronts not only to those millions who voted for him but more particularly to his caucus colleagues who were, by and large, prepared to give him another go. Not any more. There is still sympathy; the health breakdown is not Latham's fault (well, once again, not entirely) and who knows how much the pancreatitis, and perhaps its treatment, has impaired his judgement. But the inescapable fact is that he had become unelectable. Even if his disease turned out to be manageable, Mark Latham had proved not to be.

So: where to from here? The prospect is even bleaker than it was when Simon Crean hit the wall. Kim Beazley may be a safe pair of hands, but they are even more wrinkled than they were when Latham beat him last time; his return now would be an admission that Labor has nothing new to offer. To elect either of the glimmer twins, Stephen Smith or Wayne Swan, would be to finally surrender the party to the apparatchiks. The third of Latham's turkeys, the Reverend Crud, aka Kevin Rudd, may be seen as the Murdoch candidate, co-sponsored by Greg Sheridan and Phillip Adams; if this in itself was not enough to disqualify him, his unctuousness should complete the job.

Julia Gillard is a bullet performer, but apart from being a lefty and a single woman (both all but insuperable barriers in the current ALP) she, like Latham, needs more time and experience. My own choice would be Lindsay Tanner, once Latham's closest rival and another who combines passion and intellect, albeit with a somewhat cooler head. But Tanner is also from the left and has little chance.

Perhaps Latham's worst crime against the party is that he has chosen to implode at a time when the prospects of an orderly, let alone successful, transition of the leadership is so fraught. Poor feller Latham - poor bugger Labor.

They are putting a brave face on it, but the impending return of Mamdouh Habib to Australia is clearly a huge and unwelcome embarrassment to John Howard and Phillip Ruddock.

In spite of their protestations it is clear that they neither asked for it nor expected it, and consequently have no plans to deal with it. However, they were not given any choice: Washington had decided that Habib would be more of a problem in America than in Australia, and that was it.

Since the US Supreme Court ruled that Guantanamo Bay was not entirely out of reach of American law and that at least some of those imprisoned there were entitled to their day in open court, the cages have been opening up. It was not just a question of whether there was evidence to convict the prisoners under a military tribunal, it was a question of what else might come out in a civil hearing. Habib, kidnapped, bashed, sent to Egypt for torture and then further abused at Camp X-Ray, was not someone Donald Rumsfeld wanted in the witness box.

Habib has technically been freed without charge or conviction, but Howard and Ruddock have made it clear he will be kept under some form of house arrest. They are probably wise. If Habib was not a dedicated enemy of the west when he was captured more than three years ago, he certainly is by now.

The arguments over God's role in the tsunami continue, with the question of how an omniscient and benevolent creator could have allowed it to happen increasingly submerged in gobbledegook about the mysterious ways of the deity.

It's a bit late. To anyone halfway rational, the existence of such a god was conclusively disproved many thousands of years ago, at the time the first child died in pain. Everything since has been mere confirmation.