Latham at Large by Mark Latham

Author:Mark Latham [Latham, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, World, General, Australian & Oceanian
ISBN: 9780522867251
Google: D52XBgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 25021667
Publisher: Melbourne University Press
Published: 2015-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

Moss Cass was a former minister given to philosophical speculation. ‘Just a minute’, he said, ‘Shouldn’t we be asking a more profound question about all of this?’ People looked up from their newspapers, curious and hopeful. Profound questions seemed like a good idea. ‘Shouldn’t we’, said Moss, ‘be asking the question: why do we build roads at all?’

Button glanced across the table at his leader, who seemed to have turned purple. Whitlam ‘glared at Moss Cass for a couple of chilling seconds. Then at the rest of us. “Comrades”, he said, “for how much longer do I have to put up with this shit?”’.

The meeting moved on to other topics, including an austerity drive requiring MPs to fly economy instead of first class. Then, as now, no subject is more likely to energise parliamentarians and their research skills than travel entitlements. Debate was extensive, with most of the Labor frontbench feeling the need to speak.

Button recorded how:

Whitlam listened impatiently. He believed in putting things in perspective. He glared at his shadow ministerial team, grating his teeth. ‘Listen’, he said, ‘I fly economy class. And I’m a great man. I don’t need to fly first class. And round this table there is a collection of pissants, who could fly first class for the rest of their lives and they’d still be pissants.’

One can imagine how Roxon, a PhD in political selfrighteousness, would have responded to such a Whitlamite slur. She would have joined with the faceless men in organising a leadership coup against the bastard.

One of Button’s favourite colleagues was irascible Western Australian senator, John Wheeldon, who had grown disillusioned with Labor’s Left faction. On one occasion, Button took him aside in King’s Hall in the old parliament house and asked him what he thought ‘we should do about a particular issue’. ‘Speak for yourself,’ Wheeldon replied, ‘Don’t say “we”. I’m a swinging voter.’

On another occasion, Wheeldon told Button about one of his rare visits to an ALP branch meeting in Perth. ‘I went,’ the crusty right-winger declared, ‘out of curiosity. They kept complaining that people don’t know what the Labor Party really stood for any more. I told them they were very lucky. If people knew what the Labor Party stood for we’d have no members of parliament at all.’

These recollections are similar to my memories of Labor in opposition post-1996. Dreamy idealists like Duncan Kerr and Neil O’Keefe played the role of Moss Cass. Most of what we did and said was futile—a testament to wasted time and wasted lives.

Eleven years later, when the party eventually returned to government, of the 27 members of Beazley’s first shadow cabinet, only seven became ministers. By this time, more than half of the group (15) had left parliament, either through retirement or losing their seats.

In 1996 we hadn’t even met Rudd. He was elected two years later, a permanent jackhammer of ambition, who went on to undermine every Labor leader under whom he served: Crean, myself, Beazley and Gillard. Perhaps Shorten will

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