Free Republic

EVERY politician has enemies. John Howard's fantastic luck in his decade as Prime Minister is that these are his. Look at them -- shrill artists, damn-Australia mandarins, group-think academics, stuff-you activists, sour journalists, gimme-rights ethnic bosses and the other discords of this cacophony of hate. When Howard on March 2 celebrates his 10th anniversary in power, he owes these yammerers, now almost toxic with impotence, a silent prayer of thanks. For they have helped him to win four elections by demonstrating a truth few non-politicians know and even fewer politicians dare to exploit: that your enemies advertise your strengths better...

THE departure of Ian Macdonald from the federal ministry marks the point at which one of the great untold stories of the 2004 election can be written: how John Howard almost handed Mark Latham the prime ministership of the country. Howard, anxious to widen his ministerial reshuffle following Robert Hill's departure, rang Macdonald, his minister for forestry, two weeks ago to inform him there was no longer a frontbench place for him. Macdonald, loyal to the end, publicly walked the plank, pre-empting what would have been an inevitable sacking. In a statement marking Macdonald's demise, the Prime Minister said in...

FORMER Labor leader Mark Latham almost ran over a TV cameraman outside his Sydney home today, just a day after he threw a punch at a photographer and smashed up his camera. Channel 7 is examining footage and taking legal advice on the incident this morning outside Mr Latham's home in south-west Sydney. The photographer was uninjured but Seven's head of news in Sydney, Chris Willis, said the footage clearly showed Mr Latham's car veer toward the cameraman as he stood on the side of the road. "Latham backs out of the driveway," Mr Willis said, "and you can see...

THIS is what was left of a $12,000 camera after Mark Latham's meltdown outside a Hungry Jack's on the first anniversary of his exit as Labor leader. Worse than a war zone ... Ross Schultz's Nikon D2h camera and 80-400mm lens which was destroyed by ex-Labor leader Mark Latham. Picture: ROSS SCHULTZ (with a fresh camera) Mr Latham smashed the camera into dozens of pieces - possibly with a sledgehammer - after attacking a Daily Telegraph photographer. The Nikon camera is armour-plated and designed for use in war zones - but it was no match for the former Labor leader,...

A YEAR after he left the Labor leadership, Mark Latham was back in strife yesterday. In a classic Latham snap, the disgraced former MP with a history of violence threw a punch at a news photographer and stole his camera. Sydney's Daily Telegraph was preparing a story to mark the first anniversary of Mr Latham's political demise when he attacked photographer Ross Schultz. Stunned shoppers in the Sydney suburb of Campbelltown looked on as Mr Latham emerged in a fury from a Hungry Jacks restaurant, where he was munching on hamburgers with his young sons, Oliver and Isaac. Schultz, who...

Latham dirt hits Labor in poll MARK Latham's diaries have hit the Labor Party like a truck, turning voters off the ALP and dismantling hard-won personal gains by Opposition Leader Kim Beazley. After two weeks of saturation coverage for the scathing diaries, the ALP's primary support has dropped five points, to the level it was at immediately following Mr Latham's devastating election defeat last year. A similar fall in Labor Party support followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. According to the latest Newspoll survey, taken exclusively for The Australian last weekend, the Coalition now has a 10-point lead...

NATIONAL security is too important to tolerate the fundamental misrepresentation of the truth. Two such untruths have been told this week: one by Mark Latham on the value of the US alliance; the second by Deputy Prime Minister Mark Vaile on the posture of Kim Beazley and his frontbench on that alliance. Both demand repudiation. First on Mark Latham. In The Latham Diaries, my former leader dismisses the alliance formed by John Curtin as "just another form of neo-colonialism", "the latest manifestation of the White Australia Policy" and as producing "a timid insular nation too frightened to embrace an independent...

'It is not unusual for people who try to change the system to leave public life with feelings of betrayal and disappointment. This was certainly my experience as Labor leader. My commitment to the Labor cause was destroyed by the bastardry of others.' FRIDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2003 Yesterday I had coffee with Beazley in Perth. After the ballot, I offered him a spot on the front bench, but he said he wasn't interested: "That's it for me, that was my last shot. I'll just drift away from things now." That's Beazley code for saying, "I'll stay on the back bench...

'Ditch the US alliance' FORMER Labor leader Mark Latham believed the US alliance should be ditched and called it "the last manifestation of the White Australia mentality". The Latham Diaries reveal his in-principle support for the alliance during last year's election was completely insincere and driven by electoral politics. Mr Latham mocks public support for the alliance and dismisses with contempt anybody who thinks it serves a purpose. The Diaries verify the judgment President George W. Bush made of Mr Latham - that his election would have put the alliance in serious jeopardy. "It's just another form of neo-colonialism," Mr...

Mark Latham would not have been elected Labor leader if the party had known of his anti-American views, opposition defence spokesman Robert McClelland said today. The latest extract from the former Labor leader's soon to be published diaries reveals Mr Latham believed the US alliance was "the last manifestation of the White Australia mentality" and should be dropped. He said the alliance was a funnel that had drawn Australia into unnecessary wars, including in Vietnam and Iraq. Mr McClelland said today the Labor Party was at odds with its former leader's views. "The Australian Labor Party has a 65-year commitment...

'WE sure dodged a bullet with that asshole, Latham, didn't we?" Thus spoke an American official concerned with the US-Australia relationship, in a sentiment I found remarkably widespread throughout official Washington. At all the Washington power centres concerned with the US-Australia relationship -- the CIA, Pentagon, Congress, National Security Council, White House, State Department -- people had followed Mark Latham's strange trajectory, and his intermittent but sometimes vicious anti-Americanism, with intense interest. Within the ALP there was considerable anger that President George W. Bush intervened in our election by saying, at a joint press conference with a visiting John Howard,...

Mark Latham's latest outbursts have left federal colleagues bewildered and state premiers seething. Mark Latham is a dead leader walking, burning in a fire of his own making, with his colleagues having no idea where the new crisis into which he has plunged Labor will go from here. Yesterday senior Labor members were amazed at Latham's assault on Stephen Conroy, his deputy Senate leader, and desperately wondering what was in the head of this unpredictable leader who is handling defeat badly. The diminishing band of Labor MPs who believed Latham might be able to rehabilitate himself and the Opposition between...

Losing it THE final Saturday before election day 2004 dawned cool and cloudy in Sydney. But at Labor campaign headquarters in Canberra, the party's senior strategists permitted themselves a brief moment of sunny high spirits. After a long and haphazard campaign, the main event on Mark Latham's daily itinerary was a barbecue for families in western Sydney, where campaign veterans hoped the leader would get back on track, hammering home Labor's key campaign message: "Families under financial pressure - ease the squeeze." Like most campaign stunts, the barbecue at a park in Parramatta would appear casual and light-hearted despite being...

Editorial: Anglosphere's leadership is singing in tune IN an analysis of George W. Bush's election victory in the current issue of The Economist, the magazine's acerbic US commentator, "Lexington", warns the Democrats against the self-serving view that the US President won by appealing to base instincts such as fear and hatred. The Republicans "clobbered them on hope". Mr Bush was better than John Kerry at "exuding optimism" and "addressing the aspirations of an aspirational people". This is always the winning strategy in a pro-growth culture such as the US, and shows the Republicans have turned themselves into the "party of...

MARK Latham will celebrate his first anniversary as opposition leader on Wednesday, but no one is betting on him lasting to his second. If Labor looked split when Mr Latham took over the leadership last December, the rifts are gaping a year on. He has been labelled a dead parrot by a former Beazley adviser, a narcissist who won't listen to anyone by anonymous frontbenchers, and a bully by a state Labor premier. He has allegedly had an angry bust-up with factional heavyweight Stephen Conroy, accusing him of leaking internal ructions to journalists, and says one journalist has been sold...

"THEY are like mules," a particularly cool bishop remarked the other day of progressives in the Catholic church. "They have no heirs." Might this also be true of the deconstructionist Left in politics, with its conceivably sui generis progenitors traceable only back to the counter-cultural sixties and seventies? There's an argument to be made. The re-election of George Bush, an unequivocally combative conservative, and the return of John Howard for a fourth term, suggests climate change in American and Australian politics rather than seasonal variation. After fighting Bush with dedicated unscrupulousness throughout the presidential campaign, The New York Times tacitly...

IT was almost impossible for Labor to win the election and unseat the Howard Government, Labor powerbroker Senator Robert Ray said tonight. "I think at this stage of the evening it's going to be almost impossible for Labor to win this election," he told Channel 9. "We are too far behind in too many seats at this stage for victory." Senator Ray said Labor would probably come out of the election with fewer seats in the House of Representatives. But even if Labor lost seats, he believed Opposition Leader Mark Latham would hold on to his position, he said.

PRIME Minister John Howard today said he would brief Opposition Leader Mark Latham and tell the Australian people if any terror threat emerged during the election campaign. But Mr Howard said there was nothing to brief on so far. He said he did not want to be accused of in some way seeking to use possible threats of a terror attack for political advantage. "What I promise the Australian people is two things. Firstly if there is any hard information that they should have, I will make it available and I will communicate it at the same time to the...

HE'S a genius, Mark Latham -- even when he's in agony, he's thinking politics. But is it healthy policy? Crippled on Monday with pancreatitis, the Opposition Leader was rushed to Sydney's St Vincent's, where he was offered a private room. Latham sure could afford it. Not only does he earn good money these days, but he has private health insurance. But he refused the offer because, Labor figures told journalists, he wanted to be treated as "any other Australian". Which in this case apparently meant having to wait in emergency for four hours. But "any other Australian" with private insurance...

US general puts his faith in Latham to stay Iraq course Tommy Franks is effusive in his praise of Aussie troops -- and beer and 'beach sheilas', writes Roy Eccleston THE tough-talking Texan general who planned the Iraq and Afghanistan wars has warned Australia that it risks an increased threat of terrorist attacks if it withdraws troops from Iraq. "Near-term gain will present incredibly long-term pain," Tommy Franks cautioned in an interview with The Weekend Australian to coincide with the launch this week of his biography, American Soldier, (HarperCollins). But the man who formerly led the US Central Command said...