Australia’s opposition Labour Party was in strife on Thursday after former leader Mark Latham said successor Kim Beazley was not fit to clean the toilets in Canberra’s Parliament House let alone head the country’s second biggest political force.
Even by the exacting standards of rough-and-tumble Australian politics, the insults swapped between current and former Labour leaders were stunning in their brutality.
Latham resigned as Labour leader and from the Parliament after a crushing loss to Prime Minister John Howard’s conservatives at last October’s general election.
He attacked his former colleagues in interviews arranged to promote a tell-all election diary to be published next week.
Latham, who beat Beazley by one vote to take control of Labour 18 months ago, accused his successor of undermining his leadership.
”He tried to fit me up with this sexual harassment slur for six years,” Latham said. ”I wouldn’t make him the toilet cleaner in Parliament House, let alone leader of the opposition.”
He also claimed leadership aspirant Kevin Rudd, Labour’s foreign affairs spokesperson, had wept and pleaded with him for a better position.
”The legion of critics inside the caucus regard him as some sort of political freak, you know, he’s not a regular guy,” Latham said of Rudd.
Beazley was the first to round on Latham, threatening him with a defamation action over allegations he said were ”completely fanciful, absolutely wrong, absolutely untrue”.
Beazley, who led the party to two defeats against Howard, said: ”If there were gold medals for biting the hand that feeds you, Mark Latham would be standing on top of the dais”.
Labor backbencher Steve Hutchins was equally scathing of the 44-year-old Latham: ”I’ve always thought he was a sleaze and he’s proven he is”.
The tempestuous Latham was always a risk to elect as Labour leader, having earlier made headlines by breaking a taxi driver’s arm in a dispute over a fare and describing United States President George Bush as ”dangerous and incompetent”.
Members of Howard’s conservative coalition were overjoyed at the very public washing of dirty political laundry.
Health Minister Tony Abbott described the bloodletting at the top of Labour as an ”orgy of political cannibalism” that proved the truth of Latham’s claim that the alternative government was ”irreparably broken and dysfunctional”.
Howard said the foolishness of appointing Latham leader had come back to haunt the Labour Party. ”Whatever might be said over the next few days, it ought to be remembered that he was chosen by the Labour party and claims to be an outsider – I think in some respects he was the quintessential insider,” Howard said. – Sapa-DPA