Doug Lorimer
The Labor Party's three-day 2004 national conference formally began on January 29 with federal ALP leader Mark Latham's keynote speech. However, the conference — a largely staged-managed public relations event to launch Latham's bid to succeed Prime Minister John Howard — really began the evening before.
Paying $275 a head — or $11,000 for a VIP table — 900 guests turned up at the Sydney Westin Hotel on January 28 for an ALP fundraising dinner.
In an article headlined "Labor's influential new friends", the next day's Australian Financial Review reported that it "was Mark Latham's night — his first big election fundraiser — and he attracted a large cross-section of Sydney's business community". "Business community" is corporate media-speak for company bosses.
The AFR also reported that about 110 corporations had paid $7500 each to have observers at the ALP conference, which was "up on the 80 observers who went to the last one in Hobart three years ago".
Veteran pollster Rod Cameron told the AFR: "20 out of 20 business people are interested in what [Latham] has to say, and of those 20, 19 have come away with a favourable impression."
This "favourable impression" has been carried over into the corporate media coverage. This was described by ABC 7.30 Report anchor Kerry O'Brien as Latham's "dream run", with "overwhelmingly positive exposure of his speech to the ALP national conference in almost every daily newspaper" including the rabidly pro-Howard Murdoch press. Murdoch's Sydney Daily Telegraph, for example, editorialised that Latham's speech "deserves praise for its breadth and ambition".
But there is not much that is new in the Latham phenomenon. In the January 30 AFR, Laura Tingle observed that "80% of Latham's speech yesterday concerned policy developed and announced by his unfortunate predecessor Simon Crean".
Why then have the corporate rich warmed to Latham in a way they didn't to Crean? The explanation was perhaps captured in the headline of Tingle's comment piece: "Labor's new sensation talks the talk".
Latham shares the same commitment to neoliberal ("economic rationalist") economic policies as Crean. "Competition and productivity are Labor words", Latham told the ALP conference. But he sells this policy agenda in ideological terms that the bosses fully agree with.
A prime example of this was Latham's comment in his opening speech to the ALP conference about the world being divided into "slackers" and "hard workers". The role of government, in Latham's view, is to punish the "slackers" and provide a "ladder of opportunity" to private enrichment for the "hard workers". The corporate bosses, of course, believe they are the hardest workers in the country.
In his conference address, Latham avoided spelling out how he thought he as prime minister would deal with the "slackers" — Lathamese for the poor. But as Adele Horin noted in the January 31 Sydney Morning Herald, Latham's prescription is even more brutal than Howard's: "If you think John Howard is tough on the poor, if you think his mutual obligation regime is a one-way street, you should hear what Latham has in mind.
"The Howard government cuts welfare payments if the unemployed don't look for work. But Latham wants to cut welfare payments if poor people fail to better themselves generally. In The Enabling State, Latham writes that welfare payments should be conditional on people making an effort to 'learn new skills, improve their health, educate their children, and whenever possible, accept new work opportunities'.
"It is not enough for the poor and unemployed to look for work, they will have to conform to Latham's model of the aspirational citizen or starve. 'This power [of cutting benefits] is sometimes needed to jolt people out of the negativity of long-term welfare', he writes.
"A free marketeer on the economic front, Latham seeks an extraordinary degree of government control over the lives of poor Australians. He envisages an army of case workers 'with the power to negotiate welfare responsibilities' across every area of a poor person's life. Poor people would be required to sign an all-encompassing contract. This would involve a range of government departments 'training programs, schools, health providers, family services, etc.', Latham writes.
"Case workers would monitor compliance and report to Centrelink, the old social security department, when people breached their agreements to be good.
"When he was education spokesman under Kim Beazley, the authoritarian Latham was in full-flight before his relegation to the backbench. He advocated benefit cuts if the unemployed failed to supervise homework or refused to attend adult education classes."
Helping the rich get richer, and forcing to the poor to work to enrich them has always been capitalist bosses' view of the proper role of government. It's a view fully shared and openly espoused by Latham.
No wonder Murdoch's Daily Telegraph described Latham's speech to the ALP conference as a "New light on the hill".
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, February 4, 2004.
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