Mark Latham
Mark William Latham is an Australian politician and media commentator who is a member of the New South Wales Legislative Council. He previously served as the leader of the Australian Labor Party and leader of the opposition from December 2003 to January 2005, leading the party to defeat at the 2004 federal election. He left the ALP in 2017 and joined Pauline Hanson's One Nation in 2018, gaining a seat for that party in the New South Wales Legislative Council at the 2019 New South Wales state election and winning re-election in 2023.
Latham was born in Sydney and studied economics at the University of Sydney. He joined the Labor Party at a young age and worked as a research assistant to Gough Whitlam and Bob Carr. He was elected to the Liverpool City Council in 1987 and became mayor in 1991. Latham entered the House of Representatives by winning the seat of Werriwa at the 1994 Werriwa by-election. He was included in Labor's shadow cabinet after the 1996 federal election, but left the frontbench in 1998 following a dispute with the party leader, Kim Beazley. He returned to the shadow cabinet in 2001, when Simon Crean became leader.
Latham became leader of the Labor Party in December 2003, narrowly defeating Beazley in a leadership vote after Crean's resignation. He was the youngest leader of the party since Chris Watson in 1901. At the 2004 federal election, the ALP lost five seats and reduced its share of the two-party-preferred vote; the incumbent Howard government was re-elected to a fourth term. Latham became disillusioned with politics and retired in January 2005. After leaving politics, he published a memoir, The Latham Diaries, in which he attacked his former colleagues and condemned the state of political life in Australia.
After leaving parliament, Latham started a career as a prominent political and social commentator, and became highly critical of the Labor Party and left-wing politics. He would soon gain a reputation for making inflammatory and controversial comments. In December 2016, he began co-hosting Outsiders on Sky News Live, but he was fired from the network in March 2017 after he made insulting comments about a fellow presenter and the teenage daughter of a governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia. Latham returned to politics and joined the Liberal Democratic Party in May 2017, which led to him receiving a lifetime ban from the Labor Party. In November 2018, Latham left the Liberal Democrats and announced that he had joined One Nation as its state leader in New South Wales. He successfully stood for One Nation in the upper house at the 2019 state election. He resigned in the middle of his eight-year term on 2 March 2023 in order to run for a new eight-year term at the state election later that month.
In August 2023, One Nation federal leader Pauline Hanson announced Latham had been removed as leader of the party's New South Wales division. Shortly thereafter Latham resigned from One Nation to sit as an independent.
Early career
Latham was born on 28 February 1961 in Ashcroft, a suburb of south-western Sydney in New South Wales. He was educated at Hurlstone Public School; the Hurlstone Agricultural High School, where he was dux; and at the University of Sydney, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Economics with Honours in 1982. While he was a student, Latham worked at the Green Valley Hotel for 2 years. He also worked as an adviser to Labor politician John Kerin from 1980 to 1982. After completing his degree, Latham worked as a research assistant to the former Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam from 1982 to 1987, which included working on the latter's book The Whitlam Government, and then as an adviser to then-Leader of the New South Wales Opposition Bob Carr from 1988 to 1991.In 1987, he was elected to the Liverpool City Council, in Sydney's south-west, and was mayor from 1991 to 1994. Latham played rugby union with the Liverpool Bulls club and had a stint as its president. He has also been a fan of St George Dragons rugby league club since 1968.
Latham's term as mayor saw radical changes introduced to the council, with large spending on public works, to be paid for by a combination of loans and efficiencies achieved from outsourcing many council services.
In an article in Quarterly Essay, journalist Margaret Simons, who conducted an extensive investigation of the period, concluded that there were real issues in the financial management of the council. These mostly related to the drafting of the outsourcing agreements. Simons also said most of the allegations come from council members who were sacked for incompetence by the state government.
On 1 June 2004, Latham told Parliament that during his time as mayor he had reduced Liverpool's debt service ratio from 17 to 10 percent, which he said was less than half of western Sydney's average. He also said Liverpool had adopted a debt retirement strategy that he claimed would have made it debt free by 2005, but it was not implemented by his successors.
Labor member of Parliament
In January 1994, Latham was elected at a by-election to the House of Representatives for the Sydney seat of Werriwa, which had been Gough Whitlam's seat from 1952 to 1978. He was elected to the Opposition front bench after Labor lost the 1996 election, and became shadow minister for education. After the 1998 election he resigned from the front bench following a policy dispute with the opposition leader, Kim Beazley. The two became political enemies following this incident.The views expressed in Civilising Global Capital alienated him from many Labor traditionalists, but his aggressive parliamentary style won him many admirers. He once referred to Prime Minister John Howard as an "arselicker" and to the Liberal Party frontbench as a "conga line of suckholes". He also described U.S. President George W. Bush as "the most incompetent and dangerous president in living memory".
On politics, Latham commented in 2002:
I'm a hater. Part of the tribalness of politics is to really dislike the other side with intensity. And the more I see of them the more I hate them. I hate their negativity. I hate their narrowness. I hate the way, for instance, John Howard tries to appeal to suburban values when I know that he hasn't got any real answers to the problems and challenges we face. I hate the phoniness of that.
Leader of the Opposition (2003-2005)
Latham was a strong supporter of Kim Beazley's successor Simon Crean, defending the leader against his critics within the party. He called Crean's principal frontbench detractors, Stephen Smith, Stephen Conroy and Wayne Swan "the three roosters". When Crean resigned the Labor leadership, Latham contested the ballot for leader against Beazley. On 2 December 2003, Latham won the vote for the leadership by 47 votes to 45. Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard were early contenders for the leadership, but both withdrew in favour of Beazley and Latham respectively. At age 42, Latham became the youngest leader of the federal parliamentary Labor Party since its first leader Chris Watson, who became leader at age 33 in 1901. In his first press conference as leader, Latham championed his belief in a "ladder of opportunity" that would bring prosperity to all Australians.The Howard government targeted Latham's brash personality and his colourful past. Howard characterised him as "Mr Flip-Flop". Peter Costello attempted to damage Latham's economic credentials by referring to the experimental economic ideas that he had put forward as shadow treasurer, such as abolishing negative gearing and replacing the GST with a Progressive Expenditure Tax. Frequent references were made to Latham's temper; he was alleged to have broken a taxi-driver's arm in a scuffle arising from a fare dispute.
On winning the leadership, Latham appointed his predecessor, Simon Crean, as shadow treasurer, while also retaining a number of Kim Beazley's supporters in senior positions. In July 2004, Beazley himself was re-elected to the ALP front bench as Shadow Minister for Defence.
In January 2004, the Labor Party national conference was held in Sydney. During the conference, Latham received very positive media coverage and introduced his plans for early childhood literacy. As leader, he chose to focus on "values" issues, such as early childhood policy, education and health reform, and economic relief for middle-class Australia, which he termed with the political slogan "ease the squeeze".
In March, following the Spanish election at which the pro-Bush administration People's Party government was defeated, Latham sparked a new controversy by committing a Labor government to withdrawing Australian troops from Iraq by Christmas. At that time, Australia had about 850 troops in Iraq, mostly involved in patrol work and in training members of the new Iraqi defence forces. Howard accused Latham of a "cut and run" approach and said "it's not the Australian way not to stay the distance".
2004 federal election campaign
Until March 2004, Labor under Latham's leadership held a strong lead in national opinion polls. Latham's commitment to withdraw from Iraq was seen as divisive, and potentially harmful to his chances of electoral success. During the campaign, Latham was accused of "flip-flopping" between being supportive and critical of the Iraq war, in an attempt to appease both the U.S. government, as well as more moderate voters.In June 2004, Labor's "troops home by Christmas" policy came under fire from U.S. President George W. Bush who, at a White House press conference during Howard's visit to Washington DC, described it as "disastrous".
Shortly afterwards, Latham announced the recruitment of Peter Garrett, president of the Australian Conservation Foundation and former lead singer with the rock band Midnight Oil, as a Labor candidate in Kingsford Smith, a safe Sydney electorate being vacated by the retiring former minister Laurie Brereton. Garrett revealed that he had been approached months before by senior ALP figures, including John Faulkner and Kim Beazley, and had taken this long to make up his mind.
The second coup scored by Latham was the announcement that he would abolish the generous superannuation schemes available to members of parliament; his plan was quickly adopted by the Howard government in the face of a rising wave of public support with the support of his mentor former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, the former member for Werriwa.
Other announced policies and initiatives included: the introduction of federal government parenting classes for those parents deemed to be failing to adequately discipline their children; a ban on food and drink advertising during children's television viewing hours; the introduction of a national youth mentoring program; the government distribution of free story books to the families of newborn children; a federal ban on plastic shopping bags; and the introduction of legislation to prohibit vilification on the basis of religious beliefs or sexual orientation, similar to laws adopted in the state of Victoria that some critics said had led to a restriction of free speech. Some of these initiatives prompted Howard to criticise Latham as a "behavioural policeman".
In July 2004, Latham again became the centre of controversy when it was alleged on a commercial television network that he had punched a political rival during his time on Liverpool Council, though Latham denied such events happening, calling the claim 'ridiculous, untrue and unbelievable", whilst accusing the Government of running a 'smear campaign'. On 6 July 2004, he called a press conference and denounced the government for maintaining what he called a "dirt unit," which he said was gathering personal material about him, including details of his first marriage. The government denied that any such unit existed, but some observers speculated that Liberal Party researchers had accumulated more potentially embarrassing material about Latham, which would be used during the election campaign, in addition to claims that Latham was an inexperienced economic manager.
Between March and August, both Latham's and Labor's position in the opinion polls gradually declined, with John Howard being the preferred prime minister by 17 points over Latham in July. During August, Labor claimed a tactical victory over the government on the issue of the Australia – United States Free Trade Agreement and there were allegations in a Senate inquiry that Howard had lied about the "Children Overboard Affair" during the 2001 election campaign. By mid-August, Labor was again ahead in all three national opinion polls.