Matt Cowgill's Back to the future with Mark Latham’s Quarterly Essay concludes with:
The essay isn’t all bad. I applaud Latham’s goal, announced in the first chapter, of producing a work that is more focused on policy proposals than on blood-letting and carping from the sidelines. I do, strange as it might seem, agree with him about many aspects of policy. Labor has always been a pragmatic party, a party that seeks to govern. It’s not a dogmatic party, driven by purist ideology. Latham has that right. I think that Labor was right to float the dollar and to pursue many of the more market-oriented reforms it has implemented over the past three decades.But I think that Latham is wrong to miss the other half of the picture, Keating’s view that if people “fall off the pace you will reach back and pull them up.” Some members of the Clause IV generation are too keen to leave behind central elements of the centre-left agenda.
Mark Bahnisch, who seems to have had a run in with Latham in the past, isn't a fan of the essay. His post Mark Latham Redux: Just a step to the right? concludes with:
I’ve enjoyed a lot of Mark Latham’s occasional writing in the Financial Review and in Crikey, but I don’t think Australian Labor has a lot to learn from ‘Not Dead Yet’. Nevertheless, it’s a good thing that he’s written the essay, as debate among Labor people and sympathisers about its political philosophy and strategic direction is much to be welcomed.In Mark Latham and the return of the underclass Don Arthur writes that Latham's plan to end poverty won't.
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