Friday, September 16, 2005
MANIAC PM AVOIDED
Australia didn’t merely dodge a bullet last year by declining to elect Mark Latham ... we dodged a freakin’ firestorm:
Former Labor leader Mark Latham believed the US alliance should be ditched and called it “the last manifestation of the White Australia mentality”.
The Latham Diaries reveal his in-principle support for the alliance during last year’s election was completely insincere and driven by electoral politics.
The man was insane. Hit the link for further evidence; Latham believed we should have adopted New Zealand’s foreign policy. Not that he told us, of course. For all we knew, Latham supported ties to the US. Also in today’s press, sensible centrist ABC presenter and SMH columnist Richard Glover deals with the lunatic:
Latham’s just a hater, plain and simple - and that hatred can be sprayed at his own tribe as easily as at the enemy.
He was always a pissant, to use an old-fashioned Aussie word. It’s usually defined as “small but aggressive”, which just about sums him up. Long before Latham became leader, his books revealed a man with limited abilities yoked to a monstrous ego.
Presumably no one in the party bothered to read Latham’s books, or they would never have voted him leader. In successive chapters, he would stumble around the left’s intellectual storehouse, bumping up against various thinkers whose ideas he would then proclaim as his own. Occasionally, he would pause and marvel at his own brilliance, while attacking others for not spotting his true genius.
Pure pissant.
Latham could have become—in final pre-election weeks I thought he would become—Australia’s Prime Minister. Thankfully, we remain a lucky (and clever) country.