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...messages, their import, would be evaded by those most affected, no matter how he had told his story. The only question was whether those who could be interested in hearing his views would be able to gain easy access. Like so many other uncomfortable facts and inconvenient opinions, they would be censored out or misrepresented.
Latham did a number of things in his Diaries. He looked at the structure, the policies, the membership, the support base and the history of the Labor movement. He then declared the party unviable and the unions an obnoxious burden. Neither had a respectable future. He told of his experiences in the party and in parliament, and what he thought of some of the other main Labor performers. He looked at the behaviour of the media and spoke of their treatment of him; and gave us a picture of himself, the man. Finally, Latham advanced a number of ways in which politics could be dealt with differently in the future.
It was Latham's formal analysis of the party and Labor movement and his positing of alternatives which interested sympathetic observers the most, and which they feared would be drowned in an atmosphere of hostility arising from his more personal criticisms. It would be these personalities on which the media would concentrate, as they always do. Anyway, virtually all media and ALP discussion of the Diaries was toned down when it was seen that denigration of the man, far from deterring potential readers, was whetting the public appetite. But it does make it possible for an examination such as this to proceed in a more temperate climate.
Latham thinks there may be as few as 7500 bona fide members of the ALP, the rest being names on the lists of stacked branches--like Gogol's dead souls. It may be that some unions also inflate their membership lists in this way. Most of the traditional supporters of the party--especially working-class people--have either left or died and not been replaced. The new affluent middle class--insofar as it has been active, has gone to the Greens, as earlier it had drifted to the Democrats. Most existing ALP members are functionaries, placemen,...
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