Political Corrections

with Mungo MacCallum

Nice try, but beware of knock ons

A sporting friend had a good analogy: the Labor Party, he said, had voted to punt high and chase.

Actually, if you follow the metaphor through, it has a certain logic to it. For years now Labor has failed to get the ball over the tryline. It has lost the set pieces, knocked on, surrendered possession and missed the vital penalties. Conventional tactics simply haven't worked.

With time ticking away and no bonus points for another narrow loss, why not risk the lot on a desperate up and under. It may go out on the full or give possession back to your opponents. But there's always the chance of a lucky bounce. So enter Mark Latham. What is there left to lose?

And on another level it also makes a kind of sense. Given that the leadership contest was always going to be close, the new boy was the marginally better bet. Latham, the young pretender, could survive on a bare majority; he was the challenger, the kid on the way up. Beazley, the former incumbent, needed a solid vote of confidence if he was ever to heal the wounds. When it became clear that he was never going to get one, a few waverers were probably convinced that nothing was to be gained by resurrecting him. Better to take the flying leap into the unknown.

Actually it is not altogether fair to call Latham unknown; while he is still a full 22 years younger than John Howard (which may not be a complete disadvantage) he has been around for a while, and has left the spoor to prove it. He has written three books, and while none of them is likely to be nominated for a Nobel Prize (or even a Premier's award) they represent a decent amount of cerebral effort.

He has always been a stalwart of the right, contemptuous of those whom one of his spiritual predecessors, Paul Keating, once described as "Balmain basket weavers whose idea of economics is wider nature strips, more trees and eat your own shit." But Latham has never been a formal part of the NSW Right; he is too independent for that.

As Keating's mentor was the renegade NSW Premier Jack Lang, Latham's is the gloriously failed Gough Whitlam. Hence his can-do approach to almost everything, not to mention his apparently reckless attitude of "crash through or crash."

But, like both Whitlam and Keating, Latham is also a canny and ruthless political operator; even in this worst of times, he would never have become leader of the party without the ability to attract the support of at least some of those who would normally have found him ideologically (and in many cases personally) repulsive. The question is whether this acceptance can somehow be transferred to the wider electorate, and it must be admitted that the initial signs are not encouraging.

Voters who are either female or old or both overwhelmingly feel that the lad lacks couth. They may actually agree with some of his more notorious assessments (that George Bush is flaky, and the most dangerous and incompetent American president in living memory; that John Howard is an arselicker and the parliamentary Liberal Party a conga line of suckholes) but they don't feel comfortable with the way he expresses them.

Latham has now promised to dump the crudity while sticking to the vernacular, a distinction which may be too fine for some of his more sensitive critics. Indeed, the signs are that quite a few have already made the judgment that even if Latham publicly washes his mouth out with sandsoap, he has proved himself eternally unfit for high office.

And this is before we even get round to his policies, which once again are going to require a major effort at salesmanship even within the party, let alone out there in the electorate. Once more, there is a feeling that Latham might be very convincing on his home turf, the western suburbs of Sydney, and may triumphantly bring those four seats back to the fold. However, this won't count for much if he alienates much of the rest of the country in the process.

Hence the first three days, during which the media generally targeted Latham about his language. He replied by asking Howard to join him in asking parents to read to their kids, to which Howard rather unwisely replied that he used to make up his own stories. However, he also promised a raft of new childcare spots.

Howard then had a big crack at Latham's anti-Bush rhetoric, to which Latham responded by holding a press conference in front of the Stars and Stripes; Howard retaliated by announcing Australia would join the star wars program. The good news is that Latham is being noticed: Howard cannot ignore him the way he ignored Crean. The bad news is that most people who notice him find their gorges rising.

The initial reaction to his ascension has been mainly shock, but there is also a tinge of anticipation: whatever else, at least he'll make things happen. We are heading for interesting times. For the Chinese, this was the most terrible of curses. The Labor Party and its supporters will be hoping it turns into a miracle; they feel that after all these years of toiling in the mud they must be due for a runaway try between the posts.

Punt high and chase. And hope.