Glutbusters

September 16, 2005

Narky Mark

A lot has been written by people sharper than me about Mark Latham's savaging of the Labor Party, so I won't go into any analysis of the political implications for Latham, the ALP etc etc.

What I will say is that this whole sordid thing makes me very sad.

Sad because I put my eggs in the Latham basket early on, and rode with him all the way. On my short-lived radio show (Glutbusters, funnily enough) we had a "Latham-watch" segment, a slot based on the premise that Mark was the future of the ALP and he was worth following, and also cause he called the Libs a "conga-line of suckholes".

Sad because after years of pissweak opposition under Beazley and Crean, I finally felt like I had a real Labor man who'd get up there and tell Howard to fuck off, who'd ridicule Alexander Downer for the poncy toff he is, and who'd drop the shoulder, Byron Pickett-style, into the rest of the front bench if he encountered them in the halls of Parliament House. Sad because here was a bloke who'd put his balls on the line and say "health and education - fuck yeah! And if you don't like it, you're a selfish prick!"

Sad because I was so convinced that the rest of Australia would see what I saw that I held an Election Night Party in eager anticipation, for which I printed out electorate profiles from Antony Green's awesome site and blu-tacked them to the wall for easy reference.

I still think that he would have been the sort of PM that made me proud of my government. Maybe that's naive and idealistic, but shit, someone's gotta be.

So I'm sad that it's come to this. But most of all, I'm sad that not only is he not around to drag the government over the coals for an atrocious exercise of their fancy new "anti-terrorism" powers ("piss off, you bearded university dick, and pay us eleven grand", government heard to say), but that he's pushing it off the front pages.

And so it goes.

Filed under Politics