Political Corrections

with Bob Ellis

Damping down Latham's petulant ghost

At the launch of the Mark Latham book Loner (in a fine, measured speech by John Faulkner, the smartest, most decent and least thanked man in federal politics) I thought of some lines that Labor might henceforth use to damp down this festering, feverish, petulant ghost, this Frankenstein monster that lurches around the laboratory smashing up test-tubes and roaring unbidden obscenities. Here are some of them.

'He should quickly learn the definition of a "B-grade arsehole" because he fits it.'

'It was a poor audition for the long-running role of elder statesmen, but a good audition for the remake, should it ever occur, of Romper Stomper.'

'One leaves the Labor leadership as one hopes to leave a public toilet, in a fit and proper state for the habitation of a successor - unsoiled, unsabotaged, unbroken and free from graffiti.' Mark Latham has never learned this rule - or, it seems, any other.

The best such gag, however, comes from my old East Lismore school mate 'Bugger' Shakespeare, who forseeing Latham's favourite image, presciently said:

'But 'tis a common proof

That lowliness is young ambition's ladder,

Whereto the climber - upward turns his face,

But when he once attains the utmost rung,

He then unto the ladder turns his back,

Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees

By which he did ascend...

And therefore think him as a serpent's egg,

Which, hatched, would, as his kind, grow mischievious,

And kill him in the shell.'

A question without notice to the Prime Minister.

Would Joanna Lees, fleeing in the desert night from her boyfriend's murderer and ringing for help on a mobile phone, have got through to anyone? Would Ivan Milat's victims, fleeing in the Belanglo State Forest and ringing for help on a mobile, have got through to anyone? Or will they still be out of range, even now? If they would, why privatise Telstra? How can it 'be ready' while people in remote places can be in danger of their lives? Why, indeed, privatise anything at all?

Well, it used to be said that a CEO will have more cause, and more motivation, to run it well than a government department. But WorldCom, Enron, Jodee, Brad, Rodney, Alan, Rene, and Christopher all show rich men don't give a stuff about running things well. Or efficiently. Or even profitably. Sacked, they walk away with millions anyway.

A government department head, by contrast, has to please his employer, the government, which has to please its electors, who is us. Why, then, privatise even half of Telstra? Why lose jobs in country towns? Why imperil with rape and murder the next Joanna Lees? Why anger nearly everyone with a greedy grab for money you don't need but your rich mates would quite like a piece of? Please explain.

This, and the workplace reforms, may show the leering, ugly, crooked-toothed face of Howardism as the poll tax showed the leering, ugly, crooked-toothed face of Thatcherism years ago, and bring him down, or weaken him in the party room and revive the 'socialist' Costello or the 'humanist' Georgiou or (my pick for the next leader) the 'Greenie' Ian Campbell.

It's hard to see how a come-across-girlie-or-get-the-sack law will be popular with women or a no-holidays-or-overtime-or-super-and-if-you-grumble-you-get-the-sack law will be popular with men. It's not even popular with Louise Markus, the Hillsong MP who is voting against it. Call it 'a sexual harasser's mandate' and it may well not get through at all. Call selling Telstra 'a new way for each of us to give foreigners $3000 a year we could otherwise spend at home' and it may well not get through either.

No-one has yet asked why Doug Wood is still alive, unlike his Iraqi friends who were shot dead beside him in the room he shared with them. He's alive, of course, because Sheikh Hillali pleaded for him, offered money for him, and offered to replace him. And the Howard Government gazumped the credit for it, by, when they heard of it (Alexander Downer called it 'a tip-off'), ratting on the deal to hand him over and needlessly endangering his life with a shoot-out. Hillali, who risked his life, will get no AO and Wood, who said 'Never heard of him', will get millions for spinning his story in a pro-Howard way and keeping Hillali, his saviour, out of it, and shouting 'God bless America!' the way almost no-one does anymore, on his release.

What a greedy, graceless, bumptious capitalist pig he has proved to be.

He was scared, I suppose, by his 'debreifing', in which he was told (or I bet he was told) that if he didn't praise the Howard Government, and apologise to it, he might well be punished under our new harsh laws for 'giving comfort to terrorists' with his troops-out call on the video.

• Margo Kingston was called away on urgent business. Her column will return next week.