Latham Stake Outs

Here's some of the gang outside Mark Latham's house. Latham was the former leader of the Labor Party, in opposition now for ten years at the federal level. He was the great white hope, so to speak, of the party, a bust through or bust option which in the end ended up a bust. Earlier in the year, we would always end up staking out his house. The neighbours were used to us, parked at the front of their homes, cluttering up the culdesac where he lived in Glen Alpine, an up market part of a not very upmarket area. I will always be faithful to Green Valley, I will always be faithful to that, he said as he conceded defeat. It was a brutal loss, but there were signs he was losing it long before then.

He had a bout of pancreatitis and ended up in hospital a few months before the election. Ruthless, the media was parked on the top of neighbouring buildings, hunched outside the hospital, even masquerading as visitors and going up and down the corridors in what many would regard as a complete breach of decency, or even common sense. The poor bastard was sick, for God' sake. But hounded he was. He grew to hate the media, who had once been his main cheer squad. And he would never come out of his front door, never say booh, and so all our bosses would keep us there, day after day. Nobody came, nobody went, he wrote a vicious set of diaries which pilloried all his Labor colleagues, an out of control stream of ill will which created headlines but did him no good.

What was clear was that there was no one left to tell him how to behave, no one saying mate, you've gone off the rails, pull your head in, no one to offer a friendly arm and no advice on how to deal with a media pack. The easiest way would have been to make himself available, and we would, could all have gone home, well back to the office. Instead his door remained closed. The mailman would come and go, and sooner or later they would pap him collecting his mail while he called everyone paedophiles. I interviewed him once for the dads show; he was enormously entertaining, put his feet up on the table in the studio and talked easily about his testicular cancer. One ball left. He managed to sire two children, who were the beginning and the end for him, as you could tell, loved beyond life itself. But in the twirling dogged stream of all this, he became more and more isolated, more and more angry, I could never understand why he didn't just move to a place with better security, a long drive, an intercom system, trees. But he didn't. He sat inside and fumed; not just against us, against everybody. Occasionally we were obliged to jump the child proof fence and knock on his door; mostly he refused to answer, you could hear the kids playing inside, sometimes, tell you and your buddies to get off the property. I sympathised with his isolation and madness; he held no sympathy for us, stuck for so many boring hours outside his house, watching the trees move in the wind, imagining life inside the large suburban homes denied to us inner-city dwellers. There was no peace for him, no peace for us; and the Labor party moved on without him.


NEWS

Sydney Morning Herald:

Mystery path from architect to terrorist

Leonie LamontAugust 24, 2006


FAHEEM KHALID LODHI said he came to Australia for a better life, and had "no antipathy" towards his new homeland. But Lodhi's journey from a hard-working young professional from a good family to a convicted terrorist sentenced to 20 years' jail in maximum security conditions remains a mystery.
"I can gain no meaningful insight into the circumstances which have transformed him from an otherwise respectable member of the community to a dangerous terrorist whose views are coloured by notions of the most extreme and fundamental kind," commented Supreme Court Justice Anthony Whealy....

"They were the consequences of a deeply fanatical, but sincerely held, religious and world view based on his faith and his attitude to the extreme dictates of fundamentalist Islamic proposition," the judge said.
He said among the material seized from Lodhi in 2003 was a CD-ROM, a "virtual library" of justifications for suicide bombings and violent jihad.
"The offender is a person who, in recent years, has been … informed by the concept of violent jihad and the glorification of Muslim heroes who have fought and died for jihad."