The fun over The Latham Diaries
began in parliament yesterday with a bravura performance by the
Treasurer: “I think members on both sides of this House are looking
forward to the publication of a book this weekend. Melbourne University
Publishing is publishing The Latham Diaries. Maybe you could read it to your children?”

The Australian is hyping up its weekend publication of extracts with a plug in the today’s Strewth column and a detailed opinion piece by Paul Kelly. And everybody’s looking forward to Iron Mark’s lecture at University of Melbourne on Tuesday week, titled “10 reasons why the idealistic should forget about organised politics.”

“Peter Costello will be armed with these pages at question time for the rest of this term,” Kelly says today. Really?

Kelly continues: “The Diaries
tell us more about Latham than they do about Labor or our political
system. Yet Latham has a purpose and he will leave an imprint because,
encompassed in his demise is Latham’s conviction that our political
system is rotten, sick and dysfunctional… At the start Latham recalls
Keating’s December 1995 remark that federal politics was ‘so loaded
with disincentives now’ that it was wrong to assume ‘the system’s going
to keep throwing up people who will do it’. Maybe Costello has a view
on this.”

Latham is writing on the Labor culture he knew, but
the Liberal Party has an equally “poisonous and opportunistic… culture
in which the politics of personal destruction is commonplace,” to quote
Latham’s introduction.

“If Latham is right, the system suffers
from such a malaise that Australia will be undone as a nation unless
politics is reformed,” Kelly writes. “Yet his own resignation is an
admission that he – an outsider who wanted change – failed to achieve
it.”

That’s not right. If The Diaries lead to a closer
examination and rethink of our political culture, Mark Latham will have
made the considerable contribution to public life in Australia he
always promised.