Quarterly Essay 49 Not Dead Yet: Labor's Post-Left
Future by Mark Latham





an insightful analysis with dead-reckoning timing

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Latham
begins his treatise of where to next for the Australian Labor Party with a hope
that he may be invited back to Christmas drinks with the stalwarts. His
summation of Labor history is crisp and a reasonable launching point for his
analysis. This essay offers singular perspectives on Latham's heroes, the "great
reformers" such as Curtin, Chifley, Whitlam and Keating, and it disses out on
Latham's personal villains, Rudd and Swan. The arguments here read soundly but
they retain some of the bad blood that will inevitably see Latham's dot-pointed
recommendations gather dust.

While insightful, much of the essay reads a
little like the old Monty Python skit on how to become rich and famous (go to
uni, get the best grades and then cure the common cold - QED). The essay suffers
a little because most Quarterly Essay contributors are professional journalists
or commentators with outstanding writing skills. Latham is every bit as good as
one would expect from a one-time Prime Ministerial aspirant but a little behind
the usual Quarterly Essay pack. One looks to find terse examiner's pencilling in
margins questioning logic or presentation. Strained quotes from Noel Coward,
  pamphleteer Emmanuel Sieyes and Hegel stall the commentary, and a reference to
  the Prisoner's Dilemma feels like a final grasp for a higher grading.

Latham's
listing of current Labor's failings is convincing: to read beyond the economic
statistics, to value vision instead of reaction, to effectively communicate
climate change policy and to tackle the real national issue of education. These
analyses justify the essay totally, even if, alas, Latham's invitation for
Christmas drinks will be lost in the mail another year. The coup de gras for the
essay is its publication in the weeks that Labor reached rock-bottom, timing
that may invite scrutiny of Latham's recommendations but also dispel them as
pointless attempts at resuscitation. This exquisite timing was recently
achieved, for different reasons, with the Quarterly Essays on Rudd and
Abbott.