What the politicians and the journalists have told you is that in his diaries Mark Latham has written a bitter, biased, scurrilous, self-centred, self-aggrandising and ultimately self-destructive book. They are right. What they will not tell you is that, in addition, Latham has produced the most intelligent, perceptive, honest and absorbing book about Australian politics since Don Watson’s Keating masterpiece, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart. The publication of The Latham Diaries raises many troubling ethical questions. Yet in the end these seem less important than the contribution he has made to an understanding not only of the dilemmas of federal Labor during the Howard years but, more deeply, of the sicknesses of the democratic political culture in the age of material plenty. Once Latham has been discredited, and perhaps destroyed, some citizens will notice that the Diaries – for all their grandiosity, occasional cruelty and vituperative madness – are considerably more important in their implication than they have been led to believe.
Latham began to write his diary as a backbencher in 1994. His notes became interesting after he was given the shadow education portfolio by Paul Keating’s successor, Kim Beazley, following Labor’s landslide defeat of March 1996. Latham was at that time one of the party’s only thinkers. At the centre of his political vision was his admiration for Keating’s pro-market revolution and for his audacious, Napoleonic political style.
Yet already he differed from Keating in two main ways. He was sceptical of Keating’s top-down centralism and his uncritical support for the welfare state. And he realised something that Keating could not see, that his government had been destroyed through the force of a new social condition Latham identified as “downward envy”, the “old Australian” resentment at the supposed special favours bestowed by the state on “minorities” – artists, ethnics, refugees, single mothers, Aborigines. As early as July 1995 Latham understood that due to the force of downward envy the voters in his Werriwa electorate were in a “punishing mood”. Even before Pauline Hanson’s rise, Latham saw the political salience of the distinction between cosmopolitan “elites” and the “mainstream”. In the area of cultural politics his grasp was far superior to that of Keating, his hero.