Werriwa Warrior Pulled Pin On Himself

by Matt Price - The Australian

It seemed such good advice at the time.

As Labor MPs choked and staggered towards the parliamentary adjournment late last year, senior frontbencher Stephen Smith spent much of December persuading colleagues stung by the election defeat to remain calm until after Christmas.

What caucus members required, warned Smith, was a long break from politics. Sunshine, time with the family, a good book, that sort of thing.

Unfortunately, Mark Latham appears to have taken his colleague's counsel a little too literally.

By attempting to suffer in silence and hope news of his serious bout of pancreatitis would be suffocated by summer holidays, the Labor leader has made yet another calamitous misjudgment.

"He just hoped that he could go on the leave that he'd planned, recover, no one would have been the wiser and he would have returned back to work on January 26, as planned," Joel Fitzgibbon, Latham's best mate and sole political confidant for much of the past month, revealed this week. "Unfortunately, the tsunami intervened."

It certainly did.

Fitzgibbon and the handful of other MPs inclined to publicly defend Latham in recent days have been attributing the fuss to "the silly season".

"I suspect that not so much attention would have been paid to Mark Latham if we'd been in a busier period of the year," Fitzgibbon told the ABC's The 7.30 Report. Nice effort, Joel, but utter eyewash; indeed, the reverse is true.

The seriousness of Latham's dilemma can be gauged by the way the Labor leader has contrived to reserve a place on most front pages during the busiest "silly season" in recent memory.

The horrendous tsunami brought with it a wave of mainly grim news stories to more than fill the holiday papers. Add Adelaide's fires, the release of Mamdouh Habib and those reliable staples, cricket and tennis, and there'd normally be neither the space nor the inclination to impose the internal machinations of the ALP on unsuspecting summer readers.

What must Latham be thinking as the furore surrounding his nigh terminal leadership adds brutal insult to his reportedly chronic injuries? Despite his interminable protestations about being an "outsider", Latham has been the ultimate Labor insider, enjoying a rails run into political life. University degree partly funded by ALP members. First job with Gough Whitlam. Another employment stint with Bob Carr. Four years serving as Labor mayor of Liverpool before winning the safe federal seat of Werriwa.

He's spent a lifetime contemplating a political career and the past 10 years in parliament agitating to be at or near the forefront of public debate. Ten months ago, following his shock ascent to Labor's leadership, Newspoll had Latham matching John Howard as preferred prime minister. A week before the October 9 poll it was generally acknowledged Latham had campaigned well as the underdog. Now you'd be lucky if a think tank comprising Dan Brown, Bryce Courtenay, Tara Moss and Tim Winton would be capable of inventing a plot that resuscitates Latham's leadership.

Latham's refusal or inability to adjust his behaviour to the voters' harsh verdict has sealed his demise. The Labor leader's natural modus operandi - a reluctance to consult allied with mountainous faith in his own political instincts - became obsolete on October 10. He could either change or wither.

Latham seems to believe the usual courtesies and conventions of political leadership don't apply to him. Perhaps this isn't surprising since he won the job after a peculiar and mercurial apprenticeship that featured periods bagging colleagues, the media and the President of the US.

Latham is not without talents. At his best the Labor leader could be innovative and inspiring. For a while Latham captivated the public's attention and offered hope that Labor had transcended the gloom of Simon Crean's tumultuous and uninspiring tenure.

Now Latham has been exposed as a political downhill skier; impressive when things go well, hopelessly wrong-footed when the terrain becomes uneven. For Latham to even begin to imagine, as Fitzgibbon suggests he did, that he could disguise his serious illness from colleagues and staff while attempting to bluff his way through the tsunami period, requires breathtaking arrogance and/or delusion.

As with the Iraq troop withdrawal, Tasmanian forest policy and the debilitating election post mortem, Latham took it upon himself to make a big decision and got it astoundingly wrong. By yesterday, even Fitzgibbon was conceding it might be prudent for caucus members to start considering alternatives, albeit on the grounds of Latham's ill-health.

Blaming staff for Latham's predicament is insulting to the Opposition Leader's tireless underlings; the alternative PM routinely adheres to his own advice. Hopefully, Latham is at least listening to his doctors. If, as some insiders claim, he's been advised that ditching the stresses of the leadership would be in the interests of his long-term health, the choice is a no-brainer.

After a stupendous start, Latham has crashed and burned like a two-bob firecracker. Caucus is once again confused and traumatised, especially the slim majority who 13 frenetic months ago delivered Latham the leadership. If hardly anybody expected the Werriwa warrior to match Howard on polling day, most assumed Labor had invested in a formidable and viable long-term leader.

We were spectacularly wrong.