The Labor Party and Christianity: a reflection on The Latham Diaries.(christian ethics)

FOR MUCH of the past century, leaders of the federal Parliamentary

Labor Party have tried to avoid disclosing publicly either a dislike for Christianity or a distrust of the church. For several, this would have been impossible in any event. Ben Chifley and Arthur Calwell were "good Catholics" and loyal sons of their faith community. "Doc" Evatt and Gough Whitlam could be described as something, between nominal and irregular Anglicans (Whitlam once told me he was actually a "post-Anglican") but displayed no obvious antipathy towards conventional belief or the leading denominations. Bill Hayden at one time claimed to be an atheist but appeared nearer to agnosticism in his genuine willingness to consider religious responses to a range of questions.

But in recent years, Labor leaders have exhibited an open disdain of all things religious. Bob Hawke made much of abandoning the Christian faith of his youth after witnessing widespread poverty in the Third World. He resented Archbishop Peter Hollingworth for chiding his government's failure to deliver on its promise that no Australian child would be living in poverty by 1990.

Paul Keating, while exploiting his Irish ancestry and Catholic secondary education for largely sectarian purposes, refused in 1993 to allow the site of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Australian War Memorial to be consecrated according to Christian rites (although the remains were exhumed from consecrated ground in France). He regularly disparaged the mainline churches as bastions of entrenched privilege and moral conservatism.

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Mark Latham continued this recent tradition, as his recently published diaries disclose.

MARK LATHAM

WHILE SOME AUTHORS strive to avoid self-disclosure, The Latham Diaries (Melbourne University Press, 2005) offer a panoramic view of the diarist s mind. Unrestrained by any apparent inhibitions, Mark Latham's personal beliefs and political philosophy containing a range of preferences and prejudices are all laid bare. It is not a pretty picture. We observe a clever and well-read, determined and ambitious, opinionated and angry, crass and spiteful, unforgiving and bitter man who now believes a large chunk of his life was devoted to unrealisable causes pursued within a fatally flawed organisation. Although I had never been drawn to Latham as a politician, I regret that reading his diaries led me to dislike him thoroughly as a human being.