Labor failed, not Latham
YES, I’ve called Mark Latham a “misfit”, “bully”, “menace”, “brutal” and “erratic”. But I’m so glad the former Labor leader is back in politics.
And Labor is so wrong to dismiss their former boss as a rat for yesterday joining Pauline Hanson’s One Nation.
No, it’s not Latham that’s the rat, but the Labor Party he once led.
Latham may have changed a bit and for the better, but it’s Labor that has changed most and for the worse.
It’s Labor that has ratted on the battlers it once represented.
So when Labor’s treasury spokesman, Chris Bowen, yesterday sneered that “Pauline Hanson and Mark Latham deserve each other”, he should realise that’s a truth that damns Labor, not Latham.
Yes, Hanson’s One Nation now better represents many of the poorer and more marginalised Australians who so inspired Latham to first join Labor.
Latham will now lead One Nation in NSW and stand for a seat in the state’s upper house in next year’s election. That should be a doddle, given he needs only 4.55 per cent of the vote, after preferences.
Parked in NSW until his kids get older, he will also keep out of the hair of the equally strong-minded Hanson, up in the federal parliament, until she decides to hand over her party to him.
This is a win-win for both, who on most key social issues are on exactly the same page.
But let me explain what may seem my hypocrisy in cheering Latham today when I smashed him back in 2003.
That abuse in my first paragraph all dates from a column I wrote on the day after Latham was elected Labor leader, in which I explained why he and Labor would crash and burn.
They did, of course, but in that same column I also noted Latham’s virtues – ones which now help make him a perfect match for One Nation.
“(Latham) does at least understand that Labor must be more practical and patriotic and more appealing to voters with dreams of getting rich,” I wrote.
“He signalled that again in his post-vote press conference, repeatedly praising ‘hard work’ …
“He’s also recently argued for tax cuts for everyone and last year wrote a scathing letter to a leading Labor campaigner for asylum seekers, accusing activists like him of having an open-door policy on immigration.
“Too many Labor people were ‘now willing to excuse or rationalise away bad behaviour, such as juvenile crime, welfare fraud and illegal immigration,’ he raged.”
So who has changed most? Latham or Labor?
Yes, Latham now thinks a bit more before lashing out and has woken up to the menace of identity politics – the new racism of the Left.
But even in his first speech in parliament 24 years ago, he warned that the working classes of Sydney’s western suburbs were being ignored by the elites and feeling the squeeze of “rapid population growth”.
All this is consistent with what he yesterday said he’d fight against as a One Nation politician – overpopulation, high electricity prices, political correctness and identity politics.
And it’s totally consistent with what he said yesterday he’d fight for: “… our civilisational values, for free speech, for merit selection, resilience, love of country.”
It is sick and sorry that Labor now sees that agenda as so threatening that yesterday it said its former leader would never get its preferences.
That’s a measure of how much Labor has rotted in the 14 years since Latham last led it.
Latham summed up that change yesterday by defending NSW Labor leader Luke Foley in a way Foley can’t even defend himself.
Six months ago Foley noted that our recklessly high immigration was causing a “white flight” in many middlering suburbs of Sydney as “many Anglo families” – more established residents – were replaced with newcomers.
That is indeed happening and not just in Sydney. We have ethnic or religious colonies forming in Melbourne, too.
But Foley was forced by Labor to apologise for saying what many working-class voters know damn well is the truth.
As Latham said yesterday, Foley had been “humiliated” – “banned by his own political party from saying two words about a reality, white flight, that is reflected in his own electorate”.
That’s Labor today: antifree speech and wilfully deaf to the battlers who must pay for its new-class obsessions with mass immigration, race politics and global warming.
Thank heavens that Latham will now, with luck, become one of the shamefully few politicians who dare at least to speak. Watch Andrew Bolt on The Bolt Report LIVE 7pm week nights