The 'The Latham Diaries' Diaries: 1997

Gee, that's unusual for Ross Cameron:

Friday, 14 February
Ross Cameron, the brilliant but creepy Liberal Member for Parramatta, has talked me into participating in his youth leadership forum in Canberra. I rather suspect it's a front for mobilising young Christian soldiers, plus some quality box for Ross. Thank goodness I wasn't the only one sucked in. Howard and Beazley addressed the opening session yesterday and gave some interesting insights into their background. - Page 57


And Howard the stinker:

Friday, 14 March
A great day's cricket, playing for the Parliamentary XI against the Crusaders at Albert Mark in Melbourne. Our side was reinforced by (former Australian fast bowler) Merv Hughes and the middle-order batting wizardry of John Howard. Actually, he's hopeless. A real rabbit with the bat and The Man From Unco with the ball, the sort of player who was an automatic selection as scorer in schoolboy teams. I walked away from the ground thinking, there goes John Howard, a man of few obvious talents.

He's also a smelly little bastard. The rest of the boys tubbed up with a group shower after the match, but not the PM. He was last seen heading off for his plane in his full cricket kit. He must have thought Big Merv was a soap catcher. - Page 60


One thing that comes up as a recurring theme in the diaries is Latham's place on the free-market end of economic thinking. Repeatedly he rejects the interventionist approach of government, and argues against protecting failing industries:

Monday, 2 June
Beazley is the first Labor Leader to take our thinking backwards. A reform party must always look to the future, not the retro-economics of tariff and industry subsidies. Blind Freddy can see that these are no longer effective policy tools in the modern economy. International competitiveness is being determined by workforce skills and the quality of a nation's education system, not the size of its tariff walls. - Page 62

Comments

Lisa said…
Regarding the leadership forum Latham is talking about, well I attended it in 2002. I fully agree with Latham about it's creepiness. It's was unforgivably Jesus-centric for a forum about leadership. I felt like I spent more time explaining how I wasn't religious than learning about leadership!
29 September 2005 at 21:27
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