-Caveat Lector-
Tough talker has poll win in sight
By Stephen Robinson in Sydney
(Filed: 04/10/2004)
Mark Latham, Australia's brash populist leader who has accused the
government of kneeling at America's feet, is close to snatching an unlikely
election victory on a promise to bring home troops from Iraq by Christmas.
When the election campaign began, Mr Latham, 43, a man of strong republican
tendencies, was given little hope of depriving the prime minister, John
Howard, of a fourth term.
Mark Latham has described his opponent as an 'arse-licker'
But with only five days of campaigning left, the latest opinion polls
yesterday showed the Labour Party leader has narrowed the gap to a couple of
points, and that he has the momentum which could take him to victory.
The opposition leader came to national prominence partly though his caustic
tongue and because, in a now famous incident in 2001, he broke the arm of a
taxi driver in a row about a fare. The taxi driver declined to press charges
on the grounds that Mr Latham had obviously been drinking.
Mr Latham, a protege of the Labour party hero Gough Whitlam, has never held
a cabinet post and the ruling Liberal party-led coalition is making much of
his lack of experience.
Explaining his political credo, Mr Latham has said Australia is not "a
namby-pamby nation", but one that is happy to call a spade a spade, "and, if
need be, pick up the spade and whack someone over the head with it".
But it is his comments about Mr Howard's support for President George W Bush
which sealed his notoriety, and established his credibility in a country
where the Iraq war, and the current US administration, are highly unpopular.
Referring to Australia's token military commitment to the Iraqi operation,
the Labour Party leader has called Mr Howard an "arse-licker", and said the
prime minister returned from one recent visit to the United States "with a
brown nose and a lot of skin off his knees".
Mr Howard's cabinet colleagues were described as "a conga line of suck
holes", an Australian colloquialism better not explained, nor visualised.
If Mr Latham's hostility to the Bush administration initially caught the eye
of the electorate, he has since toned down his rhetoric to concentrate on
bread-and-butter domestic issues as the campaign has progressed.
He has also revived the traditional strand of Australian populism,
presenting himself as the leader who would back the working man against
those who have done well through the boom years of Mr Howard's government.
Mr Latham has promised sharply increased spending on health care for those
over 75 in an effort to claw back Mr Howard's popularity with "grey" voters.
He has also made much of his upbringing in a council house in a tough,
working-class part of Sydney and has committed himself to redistributive tax
policies and to greater concessions to the powerful trade unions, whose
privileges have been curbed since Mr Howard took office in 1996. Mr Latham
cut his political teeth as the 30-year-old elected mayor of Liverpool, a
small town west of Sydney.
Once in office, he promptly removed a portrait of the Queen and sent the
ceremonial robes and chain to a museum, explaining that he required a more
modern image of local government.
Constitutional issues have not featured in the electoral campaign so far
but, if the Labour challenger were to win, he would certainly push for an
early referendum to sever Australia's constitutional ties to Britain. He
once described a political adversary, who had studied on a scholarship at
Oxford University, as "more British than Australian in his values, basically
hanging out of the backside of the British monarch".
By his own account, he is fiercely competitive and a politician who relishes
the brutal nature of his trade.
"I'm a hater," he said in an interview. "Part of the tribalness of politics
is to really dislike the other side with intensity."
A health scare 11 years ago - when he lost a testicle to cancer - did
nothing to blunt Mr Latham's sharp political edge.
His campaign began badly and he was slow to find the right tone, so much so
that word circulated that Mr Latham's health problems might have returned.
When a reporter raised the health question last week, he responded by
suggesting he join him for a run that evening.
The reporter obliged, thinking it was a social run, but Mr Latham turned it
into a proper race and, when the journalist was forced to drop out with a
torn muscle, Mr Latham chose to announce it as an item at the next day's
news conference.
He remarked that the reporter had "knocked up after eight minutes, did a
calf muscle".
Should Mr Latham win on Saturday, no one should expect him to show any more
indulgence to his many adversaries.
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