By now, most politicians will have marked their favourite Mark Latham diary quotation. Mine was his remark about Labor’s Kevin Rudd: “If he grew up in poverty in rural Queensland where did the posh accent come from?”
SENIOR federal Labor Party figures are the subject of damning allegations made by former leader Mark Latham in a book of diaries released this week.Mr Latham’s memoirs accuse the current leader Kim Be
Just a few weeks before going into hospital and, as it turns out, sealing his fate as Federal Opposition leader, Mark Latham was in Perth seeking answers to one of Labor’s great challenges – how to win over the small business vote.
Premier Geoff Gallop isn’t the one calling the shots in State Labor’s current election campaign. Joe Poprzeczny considers the role of Labor’s real master strategist who, nearly a decade ago, underwent a Latham-style resignation.
As the Howard years – which began in March 1996 with John Howard’s crushing of Mark Latham’s mentor and hero, Paul Keating – have rolled on, some Liberals have become noticeably concerned.
With so many aspirational voters in Western Australia – to use Mark Latham’s borrowed term – deserting Labor on October 9 it’s little wonder Geoff Gallop’s boffins are reassessing his provisional plan to call a December 2004 State election.
Mark Latham’s promise to give up to $75 million a year to Western Australia to attract major new gas and processing projects to the State largely went unnoticed at the weekend.
During the past few weeks the words ‘dirt’ and ‘dirt unit’ have been used rather liberally, most especially by Labor leader Mark Latham, a man who never hesitates publicly insulting anyone, from an American president to dissenting journalists.
REGULAR State Scene readers will know that new Federal Labor leader Mark Latham was treated sympathetically rather than circumspectly in this column on becoming leader.
AS it has been two months since Labor’s factional chiefs moved to replace Simon Crean as leader, it’s worth asking whether the change has significantly altered Australia’s political landscape.
20 Jan 2004
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