The Latham ascendancy: ersatz intellectuals, violence and suburbia in Australian politics

In the first week of December 2003, Australia witnessed the ascendancy of Mark Latham, MP. I chose the word ascendancy carefully in the hope of 'cutting through' the contradictory images and slogans swirling around in media discourse this week.

'Cuts through' is itself a slogan peddled by Latham's supporters; apparently, Mr Latham 'cuts through' to voters where Simon Crean failed. Latham is simultaneously an 'intellectual' and a 'bovver boy', a 'Labor thinker' and a mauler of taxi drivers, a violent, exciting, wheeler of rubbish bins, doting father, selfish husband and climber of ladders.

It must be some time since an Australian politician elicited such a volume of confusing and contradictory images, from broadsheet profiles to media releases, to neighbourly conversations in the outer suburbia of journalistic imagination.

The reason for choosing the word 'ascendancy' is its common misuse. For the indispensable Fowler's Modern English, ascendancy means not upward tendency, rising prosperity or progress (in the sense of Latham's self-narrative of upward mobility) but domination or prevailing influence. Two explanations come to me for Latham's wacky grab-bag of inconsistent, slippery and easily discarded policy ideas. Firstly, in the midst of these swirling simulacra of the 'new generation' Australian politics, Latham might be some master dialectician, his genius waiting to be revealed in a hundred years by a brilliant scholar of dialectics.

There are reasons to doubt that. The inability of the average Australian politician to explain dialectics is one. The better explanation is that the personal values of Latham's political career are not ones of 'aspirational' upward mobility but of domination and self-aggrandisement, through opportunism at any price, leaving behind a trail of social carnage and embarrassing books.

It's rare that I agree with, Greg Sheridan. After all, the Australian's foreign editor has experienced his own chameleon-like metamorphosis from Costello fellow traveller at Monash through the eighties, to Keatingite foreign editor of the newspaper my friend calls The Indonesian, back to right wing, retro-Sheridan on U.S. power and Israel policy in the new century. That's why Greg is experiencing confusion on Southeast Asia at the moment. However, Sheridan's books on Asia are readable and perceptive pieces of travelogue, which is more than can be said for Latham's. Sheridan's remarks in his column on December 4th 2003 were spot-on:

"Latham's books are an amalgam of think-tank slogans and opinion pieces, bolted clumsily together like separate parts of a meccano set. He lights on an idea for an instant, half-digests it, then moves on to some new and entirely contradictory proposition. There is no evidence that anything has been really thought through enough at a serious level."

Sheridan continued to choose a particularly devastating excerpt from Latham's magnum opus, Civilising Global Capital. Remember, the author was the leadership candidate favoured by Tasmanian Labor MP, Harry Quick in the Weekend Australian because, according to Harry, one did not 'require an encyclopaedia to listen to him', unlike Mr Beazley and Mr Rudd:

"The threshold of skills required for employability security has moved to a new plane of cognitive capacity."

That means that you need an education to get a job. Mark Latham, along with several ALP colleagues, is published by Pluto Press, which is a shabby imitation of Cambridge-based,
Polity Press, publishers of Anthony Giddens' Third Way and other social democratic masterpieces. Pluto has also published Lindsay Tanner and Duncan Kerr, the latter of whose contribution bore remarkable resemblances to a regurgitated Professor Giddens. A purist could fault these Labor thinkers, infatuated with Giddens, for reading him out of the context of his earlier and more substantial work, such as The Nation State and Violence, and The Constitution of Society, which established his reputation as a top sociologist well before the kindy-level Third Way. A less demanding critic could take aim at the intellectual laziness of importing ideas and slogans from a different socio-political context rather than developing an indigenous paradigm from the bottom-up, in Australia.

Latham, like his mentor, Gough Whitlam, is an ersatz intellectual. For example, Whitlam's ill-informed academic snobbery as prime minister resulted in a government funded Chair in Australian studies being established at Harvard University (which didn't want it) rather than at Duke University, whose excellent Commonwealth Studies centre, at which such a Chair would have been highly valued, later collapsed due to lack of funds. But for Whitlam, it had to be Harvard. No two-bit, North Carolina universities for the great man, even if Duke ranks forth in the U.S. News & World Report rankings of American universities. Australians (and American scholars of Australia) were penalised because of Whitlam's hubris in imagining himself to 'know' the U.S. academic scene. All things are relative; ergo, claims that Latham is a Labor thinker or an intellectual among Australian politicians do not say very much.

Latham stands out in a political culture that is openly anti-intellectual and a political language that is violent and Spartan. Comments such as Harry Quick's swipe at Beazley and Rudd are typical. Barry Jones' career is more evidence, as is John Hewson's. These men were too smart to make it in Australian politics. Another example is the ease with which senior government ministers wreaked havoc with Jones' Knowledge Nation initiative, now known in the media as 'noodle nation', a term racist not in intent but upon one possible reading of it as a derogatory term. I am neither an historian nor a sociologist but perhaps there is a doctoral thesis in fathoming how Australia's history gave rise to these present-day characteristics of our politics.

That first week of December was also a week of violent politics in Australia, in both the literal and metaphorical senses. As an apparently drunken Andrew Bartlett assailed a female colleague in the Senate, to become the only Australian item in the BBC World headlines, Labor elected Mark Latham as leader, a man of violent behaviour and violent words, taunted across the despatch boxes by Oxford boxing blue, Tony Abbott, MP. Even if violent political language is a particularly Australian characteristic, I have to concede that in politics, violence is all around. Jonathan Freedland ruminated in the Guardian recently about Tony Blair's heart scare and the media attention it attracted. All despite the fact that Britain's greatest prime minister was an elderly man of poor health, who won a war on a quart of whiskey a day and didn't get out of bed until noon. Freedland argues that 'we somehow expect the tribal chief to be the strongest in the pack, an alpha usually male who gives off the scent of raw physical power. ... There is a subtext of male violence running through all politics.'

The American anthropologist, Jane Hill, discusses the electoral appeal of subtextual male violence in U.S. politics:

"Utterances are regimented as "word" in part by a performance of prototypical masculinity that can be read as "straight talk", characterized by ramrod posture, decisive gesture and gaze, a strong, low, slow-paced voice and lexical material and sentence structure that model straightness by syllabic and syntactic simplicity, without any "fancy" or high-toned rhetorical frills that might be construed as feminine."

Neither the present British prime minister nor his opponent, Michael Howard is described by Hall above but Mark Latham is. And so is Tony Abbott. Perhaps the next generation of Australian politics is not so fresh after all. However, the most glorious example of this performance politics, pushed to its extreme, is the Governor of California, as Jean-Pierre McGarrigle observes:

"Anyone not interested in the candidacy of Arnold Schwarzenegger should apply for a time-travel permit. In one phenomenon we encounter the socio-political megatrends that distinguish this era from all that precede it. The merger of politics and entertainment. The irrelevance of a public record or organized body of thought. The popularity of tropes of strength and violence among a citizenry obese and powerless. It is all too wonderful, too rich, too vital to overlook or disdain. Arnold is my dream (or your nightmare) come true."

Now that we've reached a point at which 'grubby' fathers of illegitimate children and abandoners of wives pass as national political debate, all Australians should question where our violent political language is leading us and whether this is a desirable future.

Finally, I turn to suburbia, from whence Mark Latham apparently sprung and whose values he spruiks. In the prevailing climate, I am at pains to stress that I do not harbour the putative prejudice of elites against Australian suburbia.

However, I am concerned about the politics of suburbia in Australia, by which I mean hysterical complaints about interest rate rises and unwise allocations of pork to first homebuyers. Apparently, John Howard and Mark Latham are engaged in this suburban business because the battlegrounds of modern elections are western Sydney and the southeast Queensland sprawl.

Perhaps it is Bob Carr's comfortable majority that affords him the far-sightedness to discuss suburban sprawl as an environmental problem.

Having grown up in Tasmania under the suffocating influence of a green political orthodoxy, I am hardly a conventional environmentalist. However, I believe that the laying out, at an extraordinary pace, of street after street of low-density, kit homes in the absence of physical and social infrastructure is both environmentally and socially hazardous.

Glass is cheaper than double-brick, so homes in Sydney's warm climate are built with enormous windows, making it necessary for power-hungry air conditioners to be run all day. Public transport infrastructure is non-existent in the 'aspirational' suburbs, making two and three car families the norm.

Social amenities and cultural outings are of such rarity in these neighbourhoods that Australians build homes twice as big as they did fifty years ago, with enough 'home entertainment' gadgetry to enable their children to bunker down with DVDs, SMS and Microsoft Messenger as the midwives of what passes for social development.

Far beyond questioning whether such an Australia is ecologically sustainable, we should ask whether it is socially desirable ...

And we might ask John Howard and Mark Latham to start leading, rather than taking the lead from their marginal constituencies.

*Jane Hill, 'Read My Article: Ideological Complexity and the Overdetermination of Promising in American Presidential Politics', in Paul V. Kroskrity (ed.), Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities. (2000)

Geoffrey Hills is a Hong Kong-based political and legal commentator. He grew up in Tasmania, where he was educated in Hobart, at The Friends' School. His hobbies including selling the virtues of Cascade Export Stout to the Chinese.

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Thursday, September 9, 2004

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