Latham attacks Gillard as fraud
Brendan Nicholson
The Australian
July 22, 2010 12:00AM
FORMER Labor leader Mark Latham last night exploded out of retirement to launch a scathing attack on the government.
He declared Julia Gillard's population policy was a "fraud of the worst order" and her education revolution had achieved nothing.
And Mr Latham suggested that Tony Abbott was more honest than the Prime Minister, a one-time friend of his. Mr Latham told Sky News that Ms Gillard was running a phony population campaign while saying she opposed the idea of a big Australia.
"She's been going on about sustainable population growth," Mr Latham said. "That's been her mantra for the past three or four days. It's an issue that's come out of the blue and she's defining her prime ministership around it.
"Today she said it's not an immigration debate. Where does she think all these people have been coming from in western Sydney? We grow them in our back garden? I mean, for every four people who move to Sydney from other parts of Australia, seven move to Sydney from overseas."
Mr Latham, the former MP for the southwestern Sydney seat of Werriwa, said any serious debate about population had to be about immigration.
"If it's not an immigration debate, it's no debate," he said.
"And I'll tell you what it is, it's a fraud. It's an attempt to con people in western Sydney that she's going to do something about congestion. And I think some smartie in the Labor Party worked out that sending out signals on population would be a proxy for the asylum-seeker and climate change debates. It's clever politics. But it's a fraud . . . of the worst order."
Mr Latham also supports putting a stop to Sydney's expansion and he said the way to do that was to stop moving more people into the western suburbs. He said that as a resident of western Sydney for 45 years, he was aware it was "absolutely chock-a-block".
He also attacked the education achievements at the core of Ms Gillard's push for re-election, saying he's seen no evidence of any education revolution.
Mr Latham then attacked the government's health policy, saying he did not see how putting a different set of bureaucrats in charge of hospital funding would produce a revolutionary result.
He said Ms Gillard was a changed person and suggested Mr Abbott was more honest. "She used to be fairly free-wheeling and open about things," he said.
"She has mastered the art of narrowness in public life."
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