Mark Latham Lecture

Recently, I received a job market report from an official Singaporean authority as well as an employment analysis conducted by Hudson Global Resources. Both reports indicate that, followed the traditional banking and finance sector, media and advertising is the most booming sector at the moment. I can not wait to go to Singapore! However, I also received an email from the Singaporean immigration agent, saying that I would be disadvantage without a Singaporean PR, given that I only have a half-year employment pass. Oh well, I bet on my luck.

There are two places I should restrict myself to go: one is city, the other is bookshop. Every time I go to these two places, I will go broke for sure. To the worst of worst, I went to these two places on one day; that is today. My bank account is now under red, as red as the new shoes I bought from a city boutique shop; and my dad goes black, as black as the Latham book I purchased under the hectic of his speech.

Mark Latham, the Australian ex- labour party leader, came to Melbourne uni to give a public lecture on his newly published controversial book – The Latham Diaries. My housemate B and I were the only Asians in the full-house lecture theatre. Anyway, Latham came in, without glasses, and gave us a ten-point suggestions on how Australian can improve, or remedy, the current scramble political status in the following hour. In his speech, he emphasised a lot on community engagement and the needs to overturn the so-called “machine politics”. He also criticised the media industry of being too commercialise to trench on others’ privacy, suggested not to buy “Murdoch’s paper”.

Other than the speaker and the topic, this public lecture reminds me the other public lecture given by the Chinese defector Chong Yonglin a couple of months ago. Both of these two people stirred up a dispute and had great impact on public sphere. The audience in Latham’s lecture showed their respect to the speaker despite many of them disagreed with him, compared to the shameful squeaked, grumbling and brutal rebukes which were received disgrace impression from the others.