Political Corrections

with Mungo MacCallum

Sugar and spice won't make Kim nice

The wash up from the Mark Latham Diaries has been predictable on both sides: the conservatives are crowing and the left are mildly embarrassed but are maintaining their cool.

Sure, Latham turned out to be a mistake, but he was a one-off aberration: he should be written out of history as soon as possible, but more in sorrow than in anger. The man is clearly deranged, and that's all we need to say about it.

But it's not quite as simple as that. While much of what Latham says about Kim Beazley will be dismissed as mere venom, the diatribe has made his colleagues take a different and harder look at their recycled leader, and quite a few of them are uneasy about what they see.

The old story about Beazley centred around his niceness: he was consistently described as the best loved Labor leader since Ben Chifley and probably the only one without a serious personality disorder. The suggestion that there was a nasty side to him seemed absurd: the whole problem with the man was that he was too soft and cuddly. Everybody liked Kimbo.

But now it appears that this was largely a myth. There were doubts about Beazley from the beginning: he was too much a creation of the factions, handed the job on a plate by a coalition of not entirely savoury people and propped up in it by a group you'd cross the party room to avoid.

For the first few years he was generally accepted and supported; there was, after all, no real alternative except Gareth Evans, who had accumulated too many personal enemies over the years to pose a real challenge. Even after his first election loss in 1998, when the small target strategy run by his praetorian guard of ex-apparatchiks failed, there was the feeling that he could learn from the mistakes - and anyway, there still wasn't an alternative.

But in fact the apparatchiks tightened their grip and in 2001 Wayne Swan, Stephen Smith, Kevin Rudd and Steve Conroy coasted until the Tampa crisis, and then essentially supported the government. Beazley didn't need much persuading: his instincts were on the side of discipline and control, law and order.

After the second loss his resignation was genuine, but he didn't do anything to stop the constant undermining of Simon Crean by the roosters, and did not deny that the undermining was on his behalf. By the time of his first abortive challenge a lot of people, not only the hard-core Crean supporters, were thoroughly pissed off and they stayed that way. When Crean retired, many of those who voted for Latham as leader did so not because of any great faith in the young pretender, but simply to keep Beazley out.

And, as has now become clear, there is still a substantial rump within the caucus who are very unhappy about his reincarnation. And it appears that Beazley, like the Bourbons, has learnt nothing. Last week he was actually trying to gazump the government's new anti-terrorism agenda in one of those awful law-and-order auctions we are used to getting during state elections in which the slavering shock jocks urge the candidates to outbid each other for the sadist vote.

Labor policy - or at least Beazley's - is to give police the power to lock down (which really means lock up) whole streets, suburbs and neighbourhoods on the mere suspicion of terrorist activity, without warrant or time limit. Howard nods dismissively: of course, he says, but let's not forget electronic tagging, arrest without trial or charge, and all the other fun things in his own package. So far there has not been a squeak of dissent from Beazley.

His complaisant attitude can be summed up by his reaction to the Scott Parkin case, in which the American peace activist was summarily deported, also without trial or charge. Howard later gave Beazley a security briefing, and Beazley pronounced himself satisfied.

This was presumably the same security briefing that was leaked to what Latham memorably calls the government's dancing bears in the Murdoch press. The Australian reported that the real reason for Parkin's deportation was that he had been planning to hold workshops in which he would advocate the use of marbles to disable police horses and teach techniques for freeing protesters from the hands of police.

Parkin denied that he had been planning any such thing; but even if he was, so what? Lovers of horses, police and other animals might find the ideas deplorable, but they have been around since the days of the suffragettes. They were used extensively in Australia during the Vietnam demonstrations. If simply talking about them is now considered to be a justification for immediate deportation, then it is long past the time when we should be worrying about moving towards a police state: we are already living in one. And Kim Beazley, speaking on behalf of the Australian Labor Party, says that it's fine by him.

Howard and his death-in-life Attorney-General, Phillip Ruddock, assure us that there is no cause for worry; the balance is right, there are safeguards in place, the innocent have nothing to fear - and, no doubt, work makes free. Tell that to Scott Parkin. Tell it to the Muslim community, who made it clear at the weekend how much they are dreading the new regime.

But don't bother to tell it to Beazley and his apparatchiks. They are already relaxed and comfortable, and they don't want to be disturbed.