Quarterly Essay 49: Not Dead Yet Audiobook by Mark Latham

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Title: Quarterly Essay 49: Not Dead Yet
Author: Mark Latham
Narrator: Robert Meldrum
Format: Unabridged
Length: 2 hrs and 43 mins
Language: English
Release date: 04-01-13
Publisher: Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
Ratings: 3.5 of 5 out of 3 votes
Genres: Nonfiction, Politics

Publisher's Summary:
"During the term of the Rudd and Gillard governments, criticism of the Labor Party became a national pastime."
So writes Mark Latham, a one-time leader of the party and still its most perceptive - and fiercest - critic. In Quarterly Essay 49, Latham argues that the time has come to go beyond criticism to solutions. In that spirit, he offers a timely assessment of the future for Labor. He examines the key challenges: the union nexus, the Keating settlement, a real education revolution, a new war on poverty, climate change, and handling the Greens.
With wit and insight, he suggests that Labor's biggest problem is the steady erosion of its traditional working-class base. Across the suburban flatlands of Australia's major cities, people who grew up in fibro shacks now live in solid-stone double-story affluence. Families which were once resigned to a lifetime of blue-collar work now expect their children to be well-educated professionals and entrepreneurs. Can Labor reinvent itself and speak to a changed Australia? In election year 2013, this will be an essential and much-discussed contribution to national political debate.

Members Reviews:
Some good ideas but. . .
Mark Latham is always a provocative read and there are some thought provoking ideas about the future of the Labor Party in Australia. However, his aggressive, long-winded delivery becomes wearing which encourages the reader to give up before reaching the end.

Some Useful Thoughts on Labor in Decline
He's always controversial. I don't agree with some of what he has to say, but I think his heart is in the right place and he's honest.

an insightful analysis with dead-reckoning timing
Latham begins his treatise of where to next for the Australian Labor Party with a hope that he may be invited back to Christmas drinks with the stalwarts. His summation of Labor history is crisp and a reasonable launching point for his analysis. This essay offers singular perspectives on Latham's heroes, the "great reformers" such as Curtin, Chifley, Whitlam and Keating, and it disses out on Latham's personal villains, Rudd and Swan. The arguments here read soundly but they retain some of the bad blood that will inevitably see Latham's dot-pointed recommendations gather dust.
While insightful, much of the essay reads a little like the old Monty Python skit on how to become rich and famous (go to uni, get the best grades and then cure the common cold - QED). The essay suffers a little because most Quarterly Essay contributors are professional journalists or commentators with outstanding writing skills. Latham is every bit as good as one would expect from a one-time Prime Ministerial aspirant but a little behind the usual Quarterly Essay pack. One looks to find terse examiner's pencilling in margins questioning logic or presentation. Strained quotes from Noel Coward, pamphleteer Emmanuel Sieyes and Hegel stall the commentary, and a reference to the Prisoner's Dilemma feels like a final grasp for a higher grading.
Latham's listing of current Labor's failings is convincing: to read beyond the economic statistics, to value vision instead of reaction, to effectively communicate climate change policy and to tackle the real national issue of education. These analyses justify the essay totally, even if, alas, Latham's invitation for Christmas drinks will be lost in the mail another year.