Michael Duffy
LATHAM AND ABBOTT
Random House, $32.95pb, 408pp, 1 74051 318 5

Craig McGregor
AUSTRALIAN SON: INSIDE MARK LATHAM
Pluto Press, $24.95pb, 197pp, 1 86403 288 X

‘THE TWO FINEST politicians of their generation’: one can imagine Peter Costello choking over his cornflakes as he reads the cover blurb of Michael Duffy’s new book. The juxtaposition of Mark Latham with Tony Abbott will be taken as a shrewd journalistic punt on post-Howard politics. Many believe that John Howard is staying around long enough to ensure that Abbott replaces him.

Duffy does not suggest this, but he makes a persuasive case for both men’s combining intellectual curiosity and political skills in ways that make them worthy opponents. Indeed, their careers oddly mirror each other: Latham, the working-class boy from a housing commission suburb in Sydney’s outer west, who was inspired by Gough Whitlam; and Abbott, the former seminarian from the leafier northern suburbs, who has a close filial relationship to Howard. Both men entered parliament ten years ago, and became known for their stubbornness, aggression and, ultimately, their ability to inspire others.

Initially, Latham and Abbott seemed to verge on a grudging friendship: in their first year in Canberra, Duffy claims: ‘several people close to both men at the time compare them to big male dogs on new territory, sniffing around each other, aware that conflict is inevitable.’ Interestingly, Craig McGregor, in his biography of Latham, mentions Abbott more than he does Costello, though he misses the interesting similarities to which Duffy points. He also quotes Latham as saying he grew up thinking of the north shore as ‘the enemy’, just as Abbott appears to have grown up quite unaware of the realities of life in housing estates such as Airds and Minto, of which Latham often speaks.

Both men share a willingness to say what they think, even where it may court unpopularity. I have seen Latham speak to a university audience and refuse to prevaricate, though he was aware that his answers were not those his audience wanted to hear; like Abbott, he revels in stirring. Both are influenced by diverse and contradictory political traditions. Latham is a ‘true believer’ who is also an economic rationalist, while Abbott is a gut conservative as close to his other hero, B.A. Santamaria, a socially conservative collectivist, as he is to Howard’s championing of the free market. On some issues involving the role of government, Abbott, when he is not defending government policies, might well be closer to old-style Labor beliefs than Latham.

Both men have strong views on policy, although neither has shown much interest in the international arena. Only since he became leader has Latham spoken about foreign policy or appeared to give much thought to how a more independent foreign policy can be developed in a world dominated by a US agenda of promoting capitalism and fighting terror. McGregor quotes from a speech advocating withdrawal of Australian troops from Iraq that suggests a more measured approach than the frenzied attacks on him by some of the media have claimed. But we have yet to hear a coherent analysis of where Latham sees Australia’s role in Asia, and how far he would return the balance of prime ministerial interest to that associated with Paul Keating. It was revealing that his first overseas trip as leader was to Papua New Guinea; it is equally revealing that neither book mentions this.

Abbott’s lack of interest in the complexities of foreign affairs is in some ways more striking. One wonders how the self-styled Catholic man of principles answers those who invoke Catholic doctrines of a just war to criticise our involvement in the war on Iraq. As far as I know (or as Duffy tells us), Abbott has shown far greater concern for the fate of ‘the unborn’ than he has for the millions of people caught up in disputes such as those in the Middle East or the Sudan. Equally, his staunch monarchism, the original basis for his rise within the Liberal Party, seems unconnected to any analysis of the modern world or Australia’s place in it. It is a sign of how distorted the debate on Australian foreign policy has become that neither book includes any reference to Indonesia, our largest and most volatile neighbour.

Both of these books were clearly produced in a hurry. McGregor’s is marginally more up to date, including, as it does, a reference to Peter Garrett’s endorsement for the seat of Kingsford Smith; and both depend heavily on journalistic sources. Indeed, both books show little awareness of what Australian political scientists have been saying about Australian politics, which may be a criticism more of the discipline than of the two authors.

This gap is more noticeable in McGregor’s book, because he makes some effort to give theoretical underpinning to his analysis. Thus he uses the language of hegemony to explain the built-in advantages for the conservative parties over Labor, instancing, in particular, the role of the media in supporting the present government. Yet sixty pages earlier, he talks of the ‘working media … who have such an influence on public opinion and who are assessed by the Liberal Party as against the conservative establishment’. There may be Liberals who still believe this, but a quick perusal of the largest circulation newspapers, or listening to the most popular talkback radio shows, suggest that McGregor on page 163 is closer to reality than McGregor on page 104. A good editor would have spotted this inconsistency and asked the author to fix it, but one suspects this sort of editing no longer happens to political ‘quickies’.

A cynic might say that Duffy’s publisher was smart enough to bet either way on the results of the next election: whoever wins, the book will remain of interest. Certainly, McGregor’s appears the slighter of the two, and his book, while not quite a hagiography, reveals the author’s prejudices far more than Duffy’s. (Duffy deals with the most contentious issues of the Howard government by taking no overt stance at all: he mentions Tampa twice, but without any apparent concern about the moral issues at stake.)

I am closer to McGregor’s views than I am to Duffy’s, but I found Duffy’s far the more interesting and perceptive reading of Latham. The strength of his book is also its weakness: the need constantly to interweave the political rise of his two protagonists means that he ignores areas that don’t at some level engage them both. The problem is that, while opposition politicians speak, government ministers do; and Duffy is not sufficiently curious about the details of Abbott’s performance in office. Thus like most of his journalistic confrères, he seems totally unaware that Abbott has quietly begun to wind back Australia’s response to HIV/AIDS, which, until Mike Wooldridge resigned from office, had been a genuinely bipartisan achievement.

Unlike Duffy, the similarities between the two men do not mean I can regard them as equally admirable. Like McGregor, I don’t see Australian politics as a level-playing field: Abbott is an enthusiastic part of a government that revels in increasing inequality and boasts of its lies (the claims of children overboard; the justification for intervention in Iraq to destroy weapons of mass destruction). Both Latham and Abbott believe politics are as much about principles as they are about programmes. On this basis, Abbott is revealed through his own actions to be complicit in far greater hypocrisies and moral failings than anything he can throw at Latham.