The new pragmatic idealists (II).

AUSTRALIAN POLITICIANS usually spend their apprenticeships learning not to think beyond the prevailing orthodoxies. Mark Latham and Tony Abbott have spent most of their careers defying this and yet have risen spectacularly in their respective parties. Their stories, and what their ascendancy has to tell us about the changing dynamic of Australian politics, are the subject of Michael Duffy's Latham and Abbott, with its somewhat exaggerated subtitle, "The lives and rivalry of the two finest politicians of their generation."

The back cover quotes Dick Morris, in his book The New Prince: "If Machiavelli were alive today, he would counsel idealism as the most pragmatic course," and Duffy agrees with Morris that a new politics is emerging. The electorate has become tired of bland politicians whose pronouncements are carefully tuned to offend as few as possible and therefore say as little as possible. Latham and Abbott, ahead of their time, have reacted to this. It is this "pragmatic idealism" that makes them worth writing about. They have strong beliefs, but strong beliefs firmly anchored in the real and the achievable.

What distinguishes both men from their peers is their readiness to stake out new ground on policy and a preparedness to pick ideas from across the political spectrum. They only care for what might work. For example, both have a strong interest in the underprivileged and believe that old welfare solutions have failed. For this reason, Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson considers them the two politicians to whom he is closest.

At his first national conference as leader, Latham spoke eloquently of his concern for the number of boys growing up fatherless. Many of the middle-class radicals, who formed a large part of his audience, cringed. But Latham, like other successful ALP leaders before him, knew that his most important audience was in the lounge rooms of the many Australians for whom absent fathers are a pressing social problem.

In a similar vein, Abbott has been prepared to defy the conspiracy of silence that ...