| BOOK REVIEW: FROM THE SUBURBS: BUILDING A NATION FROM OUR NEIGHBOURHOODS, By Mark Latham, Pluto Press, $24.95
There's a lot to admire about a man who can get the epithet "Tory suckhole" into the national lexicon; who happily calls John Howard an "arse-licker"; who has such an ingrained class-hatred of the "Australian Lawyers' Party" that nearly every page of this book has a barb aimed at powermongers and hypocrites.
Indeed, if you are tired of the obsequiousness of what goes for polite discussion in Australia and the way Howard manages to avoid any real or sustained criticism, this is a book to warm the cockles of your heart.
Its final section, Tory Culture: The Ultimate Insiders, is as good a piece of political invective as any that you will read this year. One of Mark Latham's pet targets is the "mad monk", Tony Abbott, the anti-elitist with the "rolled-gold" CV who "salivates at the mere mention of Work for the Dole", yet also "supports a Royal Family that wouldn't work in an iron lung".
From the Suburbs sets a number of goals: modernising the Labor Party; redrawing the map of Australian politics; re-capturing a core and sustaining constituency. For Latham, "the new dividing line in public life . . . is not a question of Left versus Right, but a struggle between insiders and outsiders". This divide is meant both metaphorically and literally. Latham's outsiders are excluded from the political and urban centres. The suburbs and their communities house the truly "forgotten people" of Australian political life. And the Labor Party needs to re-think itself and its purpose in the light of that fact.
From this analysis, Latham develops some practical arguments and proposals - often couched in third-way rhetoric of "civilising capital", "social entrepreneurship" and "civic socialism" - many of which are based upon a rethinking of attitudes towards welfare and ownership. Latham suggests that the ALP needs to "provide ownership for all" (not just the rich!). Elsewhere he claims: "The workers have had a taste of economic ownership and, not surprisingly, they want more. Not the cars and refrigerators that their parents aspired to but real economic assets: shares, investments, businesses and skills."
Latham espouses programs such as: greater worker-participation in the share market; Matched Savings Accounts, where welfare is tied to savings through parallel accounts that mature when a mutually agreed savings target is reached; and Nest-Egg Accounts, opened by the government when a person is born and topped up by the government and the child's family periodically until maturation.
While these seem worthy schemes the question remains whether they would have an impact on the massive socio-economic problems the book identifies.
Latham exhorts his readers to accept the "evidence" of the successes of similar schemes. But this evidence, when finally presented in a short appendix three-quarters of the way through the book, is curiously ambiguous; examples of community schemes that have had limited success and then have failed to press on largely because of a lack of capital. The blame for this he puts at the feet of governments and other funding sources who are not wised-up to the needs of the "alternative welfare state".
Latham is at least asking the right questions. Indeed, how does someone from an impoverished and asset-less background imagine their future and see themselves living a comfortable and prosperous life? In Sydney's West, Latham's primary constituency, the near-impossibility of home ownership for the vast majority of young people must have deep cultural effects.
At the heart of this compassionate, energetic and genuine book is a paradox. Latham, the hard-nosed "realist" of the ALP, is a closet postmodernist. This is suggested by his claim that, "social entrepreneurs are the ultimate networkers, operating within flat, devolved and connected organisations". Whereas the "machinery of government, by contrast, is forever a hierarchy. It is organised so that power and information are concentrated at the top of stand-alone institutions".
Moreover, he is a warm and fuzzy postmodernist, seeming to believe that capitalists can and will become compassionate when the social and cultural values of postmodern civic socialism are demonstrated. This is breathtakingly silly.
Capitalism, to function as capitalism, needs its functionaries to be dispassionate and heartless. Capitalists also require, at some point in the economic chain, the more or less violent expropriation of wealth created by others. When Latham advocates the universal ownership of shares, he fails to acknowledge that for that ownership to be general, effective and meaningful, somebody somewhere is going to have to give up their massive portion.
Latham's ideas are well ahead of the way contemporary Australia is governed and organised.
Missing from his analysis, however, is a discussion of how we might create a society that can start to think about accepting his ideas as plausible. That said, the realm of polite opinion is not exactly overflowing with ideas from people who know and care about the plight of working-class Australians.
Latham does know and he does care; and as long as he's giving a spray to the Tories and their "press secretaries": Piers Ackerman, Andrew Bolt, Janet Albrechtsen and Christopher Pearson, his contribution to Australian public debate remains a valuable one.
Ian Syson is former editor of Overland and runs the Vulgar Press. He teaches literature and professional writing at Victoria University. |