FORMER Labor leader Mark Latham believed the US alliance should be ditched and called it "the last manifestation of the White Australia mentality".
The Latham Diaries reveal his in-principle support for the alliance during last year's election was completely insincere and driven by electoral politics.
| Translation: he was lying. |
Mr Latham mocks public support for the alliance and dismisses with contempt anybody who thinks it serves a purpose. The Diaries verify the judgment President George W. Bush made of Mr Latham - that his election would have put the alliance in serious jeopardy. "It's just another form of neo-colonialism," Mr Latham says of the alliance.
Writing after the election, Mr Latham says that he should go public and question the long-term need for the alliance, but laments that this "would turn the party upside down" and that "the Big Mac faction would go ballistic".
The Diaries reveal an extreme view of foreign policy and of Australia's role in the world. Mr Latham opposes every war Australia has fought, except World War II. He blames the US alliance for dragging Australia into unnecessary conflicts. His preferred foreign policy model is based on New Zealand's. He writes that if Australia prefers being "an American colony under (John) Howard, that's a nation not worth leading".
He accuses the Prime Minister and Mr Bush of being cowards, saying "they wouldn't fight themselves, of course, but they readily send other people's children to fight in their name".
In his diary entry of December 1, 2004, six weeks before he resigned, he says: "The Americans have made us a bigger target in the war against terror -- Australian lives are certain to be sacrificed on the altar of the US alliance.
"Look at New Zealand. They have their foreign policy right, and it's the safest country on earth.
| It's the most out-of-the-way country developed country on earth. al-Qaeda will come after them last. That's security? |
"Labor should be the anti-war party of Australian politics. Other than World War II, every war this country has fought was disconnected from our national interests. All those young Australian lives lost in faraway lands, the folly of imperialism and conservative jingoism.
"I detest war and the meatheads who volunteer to kill other human beings. The US alliance is a funnel that draws us into unnecessary wars; first Vietnam and then Iraq."
The Diaries reveal a far more visceral anti-Americanism and a deeper streak of pacificism than was apparent from his public comments as Labor leader. Mr Latham sees the US alliance and an independent Australia as completely incompatible. "A timid, insular nation at the bottom of the world, too frightened to embrace an independent foreign policy," he says.
"Politically, why does the alliance survive? Because a significant number of Australians still think we need an insurance policy against invasion by Indonesia, that's why. Poor old Indonesia. They can barely govern themselves these days, let alone invade us. The alliance is the last manifestation of the White Australia mentality."
| He's right about Indonesia and wrong about everything else. Australians and Americans are essentially the same people: the rejects, the cast-outs, the petty criminals discarded by the British Empire. We got the Irish who preferred emigration to starving, the Welsh who found life in a Welsh mining pit to be too desparate, and the Scots-Irish who wouldn't submit to Anglican rule. America added many more immigrants from other countries, something Australia now is doing. But we have a lot of common ideas and virtues. That's why we have an alliance. |
Mr Latham is convinced that "the Americans need us more than we need them". He says Pine Gap is "vital to their international security network". He claims that the Americans "restrict our capacity to trade and integrate with Asia" and that "one day their trouble with China will be our trouble". |