George Orwell in the making Casino Used Cameras to Ogle Women While in Sydney MP is bugged in relation to Orange Grove Affair Are we not all being bugged. My question is Who is bugging the bugger?
Eye on Politics & Law Lords: The Circuitbreaker Rowville Books on Mark Latham
I first became aware of the New Politics of the Outsider at the NSW Parliament House. I was working at the reference area of the Library so I often came across Mark who even then had a sense of urgency about him. Characters like Mark are often too busy to bother attending their own funeral. Mark liked to compare him self to socialists with human face. He likes to clone himself on the idea of the politician who knows how the 'third way' works. To those he liked at the library, be it bubbly Greig Tillotson or the expert historian on Bill McKell, David Clune, he created an atmosphere of the Starbuck cofee club. The Parliament was their third place a place where the cosiness of Tony Blair was served up. Female waitresses seemed to like his style, although he lacked the touch of Mike Cleary or the sex appeal of a certain Bill Clinton.
Gough Whitlam and Bob Carr, his bosses at the time, expected Mark to have the intellectual sophistication of Vaclav Havel. Latham was always charming to me even shared a story or two be it in the lift or the indoor pool. His boyish eyes made you feel like playing on the soccer field. Mark seemed to be just one of us, a servant, an outsider, who was born poor just like the Brittish pollie David Blunkett, but whose eyes followed you everywhere. I always wondered what was behind those blue hazel flaked eyes ... I doubt that any writer or any women would ever be allowed to keep him still for long enough to reach deep inside those two huge pools on his face...
Ach, even if you were a better swimmer he would make you feel that he was actually leading... That is a leadership gift!
In her Quarterly Essay Margaret Simons explores Latham’s spatial political language. It’s a thoughtful essay with some attractive personal notes. She is particularly informative on Latham’s record as Mayor of Liverpool and usefully summarises some of his ideas about welfare, employment, health, taxation, and education. But, like McGregor, Simons exaggerates Latham’s novelty. She manages this once through simple factual error, when she claims that ‘Latham differs from Whitlam and Menzies in having been born on the fringes’ (p. 35). We can take it for granted that Simons has never been to Menzies’ birthplace, Jeparit! Equally, I find it hard to see Menzies, the son of a shopkeeper, having been ‘born into comfort and privilege’ (p. 35). Simons also believes that Latham’s ‘arrival on the political scene has brought to an end the fictions that have dominated politics for the last ten years’ (p. 107).
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