Senator Andrew Bartlett
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
 
Some thoughts on Mark Latham
I’ve been thinking about writing some thoughts on Mark Latham’s situation for over a week. I try to shy away from looking like I’m giving gratuitous commentary on other parties and leaders, especially given the recent poor electoral results of my party and my leadership. However, at the same time, I can give a bit of a unique perspective to the situation which some may find of interest, and maybe even of value.

Mark Latham’s situation took a big development today with his resignation as Labor Leader AND from parliament. For me, his resignation from politics is the big surprise and gives a clear indication of how serious his illness must be. Despite the media hammering he has received in recent months, I have no doubt he could have recovered his position to play a major role in Labor in the future.

I don’t claim to know Mark Latham well, but I have little doubt that it was not the apparently terminal position of his Leadership that was the major factor in his decision today. I would bet it was the thought of missing more of his boys’ growing up and not being able to be there to help them with their development, whilst possibly also driving himself into an early grave which would have been the key factor.

I think there has been very little acknowledgement of the impact of having two young children would have had on Mark Latham’s thinking. Whatever else people might say about Mark Latham, there seems little doubt that he loves his sons enormously. He has already had a brush with cancer in the past and obviously is now encountering another serious health problem. His last 12 months would have been immensely hard on him with sons of such a young age. I can only think of my own experience over the last twelve months and how very difficult it was spending so much time away from my young daughter. The thought of three more years of being away from home so much was a key factor in my decision to not recontest the Democrats’ leadership. I have little doubt that the demands would be far worse of the Leader of the Labor Party.

I won’t pretend that I’ve been a big fan of Mark Latham, but one positive comment is that he certainly wasn’t a so-called ‘white bread politician’. It is unfortunate that Australian politics has evolved in a way which makes it a high risk to be different from the mainstream. The reason why all politicians (myself included a lot of the time) stick to clichéd phrases and safe positions is that even small variations can be blown grossly out of proportion and misrepresented by the media and/or political opponents. When you are in Government, you have a reasonable chance of correcting the record or changing the agenda, but when you are not, it is very hard to get the correct impression into the public mind when there is major media and/or government effort being put into preventing that.

Whilst I think there has been too little public acknowledgement of the potential seriousness of Mark Latham’s condition during the last few weeks, there is no doubt that his situation has been mishandled and it could have been avoided with a few simple written statements early in the piece. Whether this mistake is one that Latham is responsible for, or his advisors, I don’t know. At the end of it all, he has to take responsibility anyway, and in any case it is academic now.

Finally, I noticed that a huge number of the stories on Latham’s bouts of pancreatitis made reference to how pancreatitis was often triggered by excessive alcohol consumption. There was never any direct accusation made, but it was certainly repeated often enough that it would have left a suspicion in many people’s minds regarding Latham. I am bit sensitive to this, but to me this either meant some enemies of Latham were deliberately feeding something along these lines to some journalists, or it was a rumour/gossip that got a life of its own amongst the press gallery. Either way, it didn’t seem to serve much purpose to me other than being an irrelevant little gratuitous dig at someone at a time when he could not defend himself.


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