Quarterly Essay 49 Not Dead Yet: Labor's Post-Left Future by Mark Latham
an insightful analysis with dead-reckoning timing
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.