The ghosts of Labor leaders past haunt Kevin Rudd more than Tony Abbott ever has. He’s tried to erase Julia Gillard’s legacy — and to her great credit she’s gone to ground — but there’s always Mark Latham throwing bombs from the sidelines. Sometimes he even makes a lot of sense, like in the annual John Button lecture in Melbourne yesterday:
“In my time out of elected office, some eight-and-a-half years, not much has surprised me about Australian politics. There are just two things which leave me genuinely bewildered. One is that the ALP still has a debate about economic policy.
“After the stunning successes of the past 30 years, how can anyone argue for government intervention ahead of market competition? How can words like ’emergency tariff’, ‘co-investment’ and ‘re-regulation’ still be in the vocabulary of Labor MPs? Why would they cling to the proven failures of corporate welfare, such as throwing money at the Australian car industry?
“The debate should have ended by now. The party should support the Hawke/Keating/Button model as readily as it supports Medicare and DisabilityCare.”
If only.
So what’s Latham’s second surprise?
“… even though the nation has been transformed, the framework of political debate remains unaltered. The system is trapped in a time-warp, talking about the same issues it debated 20 years ago. But Australia itself is a very different place.”
Quite. Don’t expect that to be reflected over the next two weeks.
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Government intervention indeed. ALP should’ve let the banks to sail the seas of high finance, free of any regulation during the GFC. yep, free markets are the way to go …
The legacy of the GFC is/should be the realisation that the Lender of Last Resort is always the common tax payer. Just a pity about the parasitic excrescences.
The one comfort I can draw from Mark Latham turning up once again like a bad smell is the reminder that he is the closest thing to Tony Rabbit that Australian voters ever previously come this close to electing. It must have been about as late as now in the election cycle that they finally changed their minds. So maybe, just maybe, there is still hope…
As for his comments – all I can say is that someone definitely is still stuck in the 90s here, and I know it’s not me.
Wow, it is like the last decade didn’t happen for Latham.
Yeah we need exactly more of the kind of de-regulation that American neo-liberal ideologues allowed to create the GFC
When the system starts arresting the people that created the crisis in 2008 then it will have been regulated in the right direction, but thanks to ideologues like Latham and Keane on the “left” we get all the worst excesses of the pre-GFC era as the apparent logic of success, fuck off.