The dark side of The Latham Diaries


Thursday, 29 September 2005

Mark Latham has had a lot to say about a lot of people in the last few weeks. Many Australians have been appalled at Latham’s outburst. Others - predominantly those who’ve read the book - are less offended. But how did blackfellas and the issues nearest and dearest to them fare in The Latham Diaries?

Did the former Leader of the Opposition have any great vision for uniting black and white Australia? Plans for a treaty? Any hint of an affection for the first Australians?

In more than 400 pages charting Latham’s decade-long career in politics, only one Aboriginal person draws a mention - Cape York Aboriginal leader, Noel Pearson, who Latham describes as “charismatic”.

As for Indigenous issues, they do appear, albeit infrequently. This excerpt is from February 1, 2004 about Latham’s first speech as Opposition Leader to the ALP’s national convention.

“One of the business lobby groups in Canberra played computer games with its copy of my opening speech, decoding the various drafts and changes to it, and then gave them to Costello’s office. Sloppy staff work at our end, it was sent out in the wrong format. No lasting harm from Costello’s quasi-attack, just a nuisance distraction... One for the memory bank.”

Except that Latham forgot to mention in the diary what it was that was axed from the speech. Keen observers of Indigenous affairs will recall one of items removed was a promise to issue a national apology to the Stolen Generations.

It’s been a long-standing ALP policy, and in fact remains so to this day. So either Latham felt an apology to the Stolen Generations wasn’t important enough to mention, or he was simply trying to be seen as someone who wouldn’t pander to the blackfellas.

Either way, he definitely didn’t see it as important enough to even acknowledge in his diaries. It’s a telling excerpt from The Latham Diaries because it sums up the book’s insight into Latham’s thinking on black issues - simply that they predominantly didn’t appear on his political radar, but when they did, it was time to tread very, very carefully.



What most in Indigenous affairs are wondering is how Latham diarises his role in the abolition of ATSIC, the nation’s former peak democratically-elected Indigenous body which was axed by the Howard government earlier this year.

On April 3, 2004 Latham writes: “[Tim] Gartrell (the ALP national secretary) had a tip-off from within the bureaucracy that the Government was about to abolish ATSIC, trying to wedge us. I pre-empted them by getting in first: our plan is to replace ATSIC with a community-based model of Aboriginal governance, the [Noel] Pearson model (a prominent Aboriginal leader from Cape York). The golden rule: repair the foundations of Left-of-Centre policy before the Tories exploit any weakness. And there are many weaknesses at ATSIC: corruption etc.”

There’s at least three major problems with Latham’s position.

Firstly, Tim Gartrell’s information was not correct. Government sources revealed to NIT earlier this year that the federal cabinet had accepted, in principle, that the government would abolish the national ATSIC Board, but retain the ATSIC regional council structure. This was more in-line with recommendations from the ATSIC Review completed in 2003. If Latham’s entry is correct, then Gartrell was either deliberately fed misinformation, misunderstood the information provided to him, or his sources weren’t so well-placed.

Secondly, the model the ALP put forward was rejected by Pearson.

And thirdly, government audit after government audit into ATSIC throughout the entire life of the peak Indigenous body never found one scrap of evidence of significant corruption on the part of ATSIC’s elected representatives, or officials.

Latham had simply swallowed the line being run by the Howard government and most sections of the mainstream media. His attempt to remove one wedge ended up resulting in the creation of another and, after failing to win government, guess who was left to pick up the pieces? Aboriginal people.

It’s a fact not lost on Larissa Behrendt, a Professor of Law and Indigenous Studies from the University of Technology, Sydney.

“The book wasn’t at all what I expected it to be. As an outsider to the Labor Party, it gave me what I felt was a better idea of the internal workings of party, areas I had no idea about,” Prof Behrendt says.

“It gave me pause to reflect that a lot of criticism I’d heard about the diaries was focussed on the fact he bit the hand that fed him, rather than disputing what he actually said... the talking out of school seems to be what outraged people the most.

“But from an Indigenous perspective I found two things [in The Latham Diaries] very sobering,” Prof Behrendt says. “The first is his lack of reflection about the role he had in the demise of ATSIC and the impact he had on Aboriginal communities. It’s not something that I think registered with him.”

Prof Behrendt also can’t escape the feeling Latham comes out looking a little hypocritical in his treatment of Aboriginal people.

“Latham says the ALP is a party that’s very focussed on winning elections.

“In the early days, you can see he feels that in his electorate, the heartland of western Sydney, there’s no votes in Aboriginal affairs. Mark Latham recognises the change in make-up of his electorate, and the challenges it poses to him. He tracks their increasing self-interest away from broader social issues. But his response to that is to try to give [the voters] what they want to get re-elected - he’s quite frank in saying that’s part of his agenda.

“As an Indigenous person reading the diaries, it leaves me thinking that getting people within the Labor Party to refocus on social justice issues is going to be a big challenge.

“Second to that, the people from our experience who have been quite active on Indigenous issues, like Bob McMullan, Carmen Lawrence and now Peter Garrett... well, it makes you question the potential of those people to influence a party if it’s being driven the way Mark Latham describes it.”

What Prof Behrendt is referring to is by far the most damaging claim Latham makes in the book on Aboriginal issues. And to give you an idea of how explosive it is, it’s the only Indigenous aspect of the book that was picked up by the mainstream media.

November 1, 2004, page 369: “Lunch with [Mark] Arbib at Azuma’s in Sydney. It’s interesting to listen to these machine guys: they live in a world of non-stop political manoeuvres and gossip, no structured thoughts about making society better. Their only points of reference in public life are polling and focus groups. And so it is with Arbib. Some snippets from him. The focus groups show... that it’s popular to bash the blacks: ‘You need to find new issues, like attacking land rights, get stuck into all the politically correct Aboriginal stuff - the punters love it’. Maybe he should have had lunch with Pauline Hanson, though not at Azuma’s.”

This entry is shortly after Latham’s election defeat. Arbib is the secretary of the NSW branch of the ALP. For his part, Arbib vehemently denies any such conversation took place with L