It is now obvious there are some odd things about Mark Latham. Quite a few of them actually. His attack on the desperately injured and permanently-crippled former Liberal politician Tony Staley ("that deformed character ... deformed in every sense of the word") was so redolent of the nastiest kind of school-playground bully that one would have thought mere prudence would have led him to think better of it before opening his mouth.

The by-no-means pro-Liberal journalist Glenn Milne commented: "Latham's intent was clear; to suggest that Staley's physical disabilities reflected his personality." Milne said that for Latham to, the very next day, refer to "our opponents and their disregard for the rules and conventions of public life [and their resort to] slurs and innuendo" was "breathtaking in its hypocrisy."

When asked about the Staley comment in that famous Bulletin (June 26, 2002) interview with Maxine McKew, Latham considered response was anything but contrite: “Perhaps there were other words I could have used.” Somewhat missing the point, he continued, “But upsetting Tony Staley doesn’t cost me any sleep, I can assure you. In fact, I wear it as a badge of honour.” McKew pressed, “even if it means you end up being seen as the Sid Vicious of politics?” Latham dismissed any such suggestion and then went on if anything to confirm McKew’s description: “Look, this idea that politics can be too rough and too personal is a bit rich. I can take you to any sports field any Saturday morning and show you parents getting stuck into it. Having a go at the ref, yelling abuse. It’s part of the Australian way, We’re not a namby-pamby nation that hides our feelings. I think we’re a nation that’s willing to call a spade a spade and, if need be, to pick up the spade and whack someone over the head with it.”

Latham followed this up with trying to capitalise on another matter of personal tragedy, or at least sadness, for another Liberal politician, jeering about the fact Tony Abbott had fathered an illegitimate child as a student (Abbott has never tried to cover up the matter and the child was put up for adoption). This has been a repeated topic of Latham's, though he has also spoken of Liberals "smearing people's private lives and inventing stories about their sexuality ... Howard must get off on this sort of stuff."
When he aims to occupy the top office in a tolerant, pluralistic democracy - which may owe both its survival in World War II and its successful reforms under Hawke in the late 80's to the fact the Prime Ministers and Opposition Leaders of the times were on terms of mutual respect and goodwill - one is reminded of his statement that:  "I'm a hater. Part of the tribalness of politics is to really dislike the other side with intensity. And the more I see of them the more I hate them…"

It is not too much to say a Prime Minister must be the servant of all Australians and as far as humanly possible must act for the good of all Australians. What message is it to send to about half the electorate that the national leader not only is not of their party but also might well hate them? This is in glaring contrast to a Labor leader like John Curtin, who whatever his shortcomings gave Menzies all the support he could in the first part of World War II and left no doubt as Prime Minister that he felt responsible for and to all Australians.

There is of course the incident of the Sydney taxi driver in 2001. Without going over the contested versions, the basic story is widely known, the fact is the driver’s arm was broken and a year later he had still not been able to work. As Gerard Henderson noted in the Sydney Morning Herald, a significant thing about this was that a year later Latham had exhibited no sorrow or concern.

Latham's ex-wife, Gabrielle Gwyther, has claimed that on the night she met him at a dinner-party, he dropped to the floor and started doing push-ups as if driven by some male urge to impress. He has informed the media that he lost a testicle to cancer surgery. It was courageous of Latham to talk about this publicly and encourage men to seek early diagnosis, but his comment to George Negus on television that Tony Abbott had used this against him in Parliament by being "kind enough to point out I needed hormone replacement therapy to make up for the thing I'd lost" is puzzling. The archival footage shown by Negus with this claim shows Abbott talking about Latham demanding his colleagues have testosterone enhancement therapy. There was no evidence in the context that Abbott was referring to Latham's misfortune or was even aware of it.

He has also described Abbott as "hanging out the backside of the Queen," which may make for interesting conversation next time Latham, conceivably as Prime Minister of Australia, is presented to Her Majesty. Bob Hawke had a larrikin streak, but his vocabulary lacked Latham's recurring images of hatred, sex-scatology, aggression and violence.

In a profile of Latham in the Melbourne Age (March 13, 2004), Gwyther spoke of his vulgarity of language as well as his various obsessions: "She wondered about his fascination with the 1979 movie Apocalypse Now, which he watched again and again, so much that she bought him a copy of the video. His favourite character was Kurtz, the renegade American whose brutality and madness mirrors the evil of the Vietnam war. Marlon Brando's Kurtz has seen the horrors needed to win such a war, and the reality has sent him into the abyss.

"Gwyther believes that, in some strange way, Latham identified with Kurtz. She says he deliberately posed to look like the character in a 1997 photograph taken for a Good Weekend (magazine) profile, the same year the marriage was breaking up. Latham says it's not true - he thought afterwards that he looked like Kurtz in the photo, but says he did not deliberately try to pose that way.

"He does know the film, though, and says he watched it with his rugby mates mainly for its black humour. He still remembers some of his favourite scenes: 'At the start of the movie they play a tape and the military authorities are saying that Kurtz has gone, and he's gone insane, and part of the movie is about who really has gone crazy here ... What is crazy and what's not?' says Latham. 'And Kurtz's voice comes over the tape (Latham recites the quote): Like a snail sliding along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream, that's my nightmare'."

Actually, the point about Kurtz in the film - loosely based on Conrad's Heart of Darkness - is that he is intellectually sane but had been driven mad ethically and has decided that in war one must make an ally of horror. Conrad's Kurtz is driven to desperation and death by the intractability of Africans who do not accept his civilizing mission. "Exterminate all the brutes!" the former idealist scrawls in his journal, dying with a cry of "The horror! The horror!" In Apocalypse Now, Brando's Colonel Kurtz believes he could win the war if the fools back in Washington would listen to him. The Montnagard tribesman follow him unquestioningly (even though he slaughters a lot them). He is the toughest guy in the film.

It's hard to know how much to make of this. Some people watch Star Wars repeatedly without becoming Darth Vader. But for a would-be Prime Minister it's a matter worthy of remark at least.

One magazine reported last year that Latham complained another magazine had blue-pencilled his claim he would urinate on John Howard - "I'd give him a spray" - if he found himself sharing a urinal with him. It's not so much that this sort of thing is undignified in a politician, or anyone else, it's that it's bizarre. Like Latham's calling a female journalist a "Skanky Ho" - black American argot for "smelly whore."

Political Scientist and former lefty Max Teichmann has written recently of  "Mr Latham's concerns about his physical appearance (and) the sheer political immaturity and the infantile nature of his parliamentary invective. Screeching: 'He's got a ladder in his stocking; a ladder in his stocking!' (this of Alexander Downer) and 'An old man at the end of his career.' (this to John Howard). One remark comes over as homophobic, the second ageist."

He has called Tony Abbott a "bad priest" who "walked away from the DLP." Abbott was never a priest, and the DLP was effectively wound up in 1975, when Abbott was 18. Costello was a "Labor rat," which in ALP argot means someone who has left the party. Costello, however, was never a member of the ALP. Yet Latham has condemned journalists as doing "no research, no checking," and making "no attempt to verify sources."

When one considers the books Latham has written more oddities emerge. Latham apparently strongly supports free markets and despises the public sector. His first book, Reviving Labor's Agenda, claims: "By the standards of consumer choice, the public sector in Australia only survives by virtue of government authority and monopoly." But his work is a pizza with The Lot: Ayn Rand, Adam Smith, Hilare Belloc, Gough Whitlam, Tony Blair seem to be among the gurus ... The result is seething ideological confusion. Oh yes, and according to Reviving Labor's Agenda, Australia should look to that beacon of free-market democracy, Communist China, for inspiration, for, as he puts it, Asia is stealing a march on Australia because of its alleged "Common Chinese culture" and furthermore: "While Australians have focused debate on the distribution of wealth, our competitors in East Asian have created priorities which both create wealth and overwhelm the interests of political factions."

The left-leaning Crikey.com has summed this up pithily:  "In short, we should have less democratic Australian politics and more free markets." It was of course the Howard Government that actually concluded a major bilateral trade agreement with China.

There is even Santamaria-DLP-"distributism" in the pizza, as when Latham calls for the ALP to give power away to local government "The biggest change for the ALP will be to decentralise power, both within and outside the party. Only then will Labor politicians understand that real power comes from giving power away." Gough Whitlam, Latham’s hero and supposedly his surrogate father, is praised for having "created a whirlwind of economic and social mobility." Unfortunately for this argument, by any objective measure the Whitlam period was an economic disaster, and not just because of mad Jim Cairns and Rex Connor. Former Labor Finance Minister Peter Walsh has said half the members of the Whitlam cabinet were economic cranks. And far from "decentalising" power, the Whitlam Government was moving quite clearly to abolish the power of the States, the Senate and any other potential checks and balances on the Canberra Soviet. Further, as an objective fact, it is hard to see that the Whitlam interlude made Australians any more or less socially mobile, apart from the bankrupt business proprietors and multiplied unemployed who moved downwards.

While mythologising Whitlam and Keating, his avowed mentors, as putting ordinary Australians on the way to "asset accumulation" (funny, I thought Menzies had something to do with this), Latham has been far less fulsome about the more successful Hawke. One can guess as to why, but the real point is the incoherence of the whole thing. He even regards Jesus Christ as "like a cross between Gandhi and John F. Kennedy." It is like looking into a bubbling cauldron in which pages torn randomly from the works of various and conflicting economists, philosophers and politicians swirl with the spiders and scorpions.

Latham's books are painfully jargon-ridden and appear autodidactic. Crikey.com has taken a random sentence from his magnum opus, Civilizing Global Capital: "As noted earlier, one of the contradictions of the competitive advantage paradigm is the way in which it loads extra responsibilities onto the budgets of governments while also seeking, in the accounting system of nations, to blame public sector dissaving (sic) for the problems of a current account deficit." For making public economics intelligible to the laymen in clear, elegant, intellectually rigorous prose, Bert Kelly, John Hyde or John Kenneth Galbraith it is not. A couple of the book's clearer sentences contain contradictory proposals that the welfare state is doomed and that it must be reformed and strengthened. There also seems to be a notion that "community collectives" can take over "health care, welfare and civil sector employment." According to Amazon.com in May, 2004, the book is not a runaway best seller.

In From the Suburbs, published in 2003, Latham is apparently calling on the "outsiders", that is those who live in the outer suburbs, to rise against the "insiders" who live in the inner suburbs and the cities. Or possibly the other way round. There are frequent calls to emulate Tony Blair's "Third Way." This seems to me the oddest of all. I spent a year in Britain examining and writing a book about Blairism and "The Third Way” (titled Blair’s Britain), and it was obvious that not only was it a completely incoherent concept but was dropped by the Blair Government even as a buzz-word and disappeared from the political vocabulary shortly after it took office in 1997. There is no evidence it even helped Blair win votes.

Latham's abuse of President Bush as "the most incompetent and dangerous President in living memory" has been excused by some and applauded by others. He has also been attacked for apparently trying to mend fences with Bush and being photographed more-or-less draped in an American flag (theatrics that wouldn’t be necessary if he had learnt to curb his mouth in the first place). The real point of course is that the comments about Bush, like his remarks about the Queen, show both lack of self-control and lack of foresight. It is one of the most elementary pieces of political common sense not to gratuitously attack anyone who might be useful to you one day, and that includes someone who happens to be the most powerful man in the world. If Latham ever became Prime Minister he would have to deal with the American President and call upon that President's goodwill. Further, all but a tiny minority of Americans, however they may vote, tend to deeply resent their President being insulted by foreigners. Latham completely spared Bush's closest ally, Tony Blair, any such criticism, and apparently still regards him as some sort of role-model, suggesting that his selective outburst against Bush was influenced by Labor tribalism. Not that Blair, who is also under great pressure over the Iraq commitment from his own party, is likely to be particularly pleased with it, or with Latham, either. A different standard of intelligence and self-control is required of an Australian Prime Minister dealing with world leaders.

His promise to pull Australian troops out of Iraq is more of the same: he has handed terrorists an incentive to make some attack on Australia before the Federal election: then if Labor loses, the terrorists have lost nothing, but if Labor, for whatever reason, wins, the terrorists can claim they have toppled a second member of the coalition and a second pro-US Western government.

That, of course, is before one considers the broader fact that Latham may be putting the American alliance as risk. That alliance both provides Australia with security and allows it to spend far less of its GDP - less than 2% - on defence than would otherwise be the case. There would not be much chance for "asset accumulation" if, without the alliance, Australia had to multiply its defence spending. Latham has suggested that a more anti-American stance would enable Australia to do more to "shape events." It would, of course, have exactly the opposite effect. Australia as a close ally of the US may have some voice in its councils, as Menzies in World War II gained Australia a voice in the Imperial War Cabinet. Oh, and that's before we even begin to consider the trade implications of the loss or drastic weakening of the alliance. Latham appears unconcerned that alienating America, particularly right now, is a course fraught with danger for Australia.

Much of Australia's left-dominated commentariat has rallied around Latham in spite of his spasmodically anti-welfare and anti-state economic and social pronouncements, presumably because his mouth is at least anti-American. This was put revealingly by ABC radio presenter and ex-Methodist preacher Terry Lane, who claimed: "We already know Mark Latham is at one with the Tories on border protection and mandatory detention. His tax policies are redistributive only in the sense that they would distribute even more from the poor to the rich." However, Mr Lane continued, "His characterisation of Bush as incompetent and dangerous and the Prime Minister as an arselicker suggested a heart in the right place." To get the measure of Mr Lane's values, one should know that during the Iraq war he wrote that he wanted "the army of my country to be defeated." Previously he had expressed a wish to see a Scud fall on the "cruel sanctimonious head" of a US Army spokesman.

Latham spoke on a Perth FM radio station recently, attempting to adopt a “gangsta rap” argot. He promised more "bling-bling" (apparently this means jewellery and valuables) for everyone if he became Prime Minister, possibly adding Cargo-Cultism to the other economic influences at work on his thought. The local paper reported, "Just to prove how hip he is he suggested fashion guru Carson Kressley, from the popular reality show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, should be in charge of dressing all Aussie brides." Trivial as this is, it still suggests the aura of weirdness.

Hatred, a potty mouth and Apocalypse Now hardly seem elements we need in an Australian Prime Minister in a turbulent and challenging international and economic environment.