Fed: Latham denies plagiarising Clinton

AAP General News (Australia)
04-22-2004
Fed: Latham denies plagiarising Clinton

By Steve Larkin

ADELAIDE, April 22 AAP - Federal Labor leader Mark Latham today said he was admirer
of Bill Clinton but denied plagiarising the former US president.

The government has accused Mr Latham of stealing lines about child learning policies
from Mr Clinton's 1997 State of the Union address.

But the Opposition leader said he did not refer to the Clinton speech when writing
his own speech, delivered on Tuesday, setting proposed national targets for learning.

"I didn't refer to that speech in any shape or form as I was preparing my speech earlier
in the week," Mr Latham told reporters in Adelaide.

Labor has in turn accused Prime Minister John Howard of hypocrisy, saying the prime
minister quoted slabs from an American book during his speech in March last year making
the case for going to war in Iraq.

"I don't think that people in glass houses should be throwing stones," Mr Latham said.

"There was a problem Mr Howard had at a National Press Club speech some 12 months ago."

Asked if similarities between his speech on Tuesday and Mr Clinton's were coincidental,
Mr Latham said: "I'm just saying I'm giving you the truthful account that I have been
expressing for many years now those (education) targets.

"When you say you want every child to be able to read by the age of five, how can you
say it other than in ordinary plain English?"

Mr Latham said he "wouldn't be surprised" if he had read Mr Clinton's speech in 1997.

"It was delivered in 1997, maybe back then. We are all aware of the State of the Union
address, I wouldn't be surprised if I had read it at that time," he said.

"I had a read of it last night, and I'm not familiar with the content of it other than
the reading I had last night.

"And I didn't know there was reference there to reading programs."

He rejected any suggestion he got the idea from Mr Clinton.

"... I got it from (children's author) Mem Fox here in Adelaide and I have made that
plain on the public record consistently."

Mr Latham said he was a fan of Mr Clinton.

"I think most people left of centre politics admire his achievements in the United
States," he said.

The Labor leader said he was proud of his speech.

"I write my own speeches and am proud of the speech that we produced and proud of the
way in which I have been supporting those education targets for many years now," he said.

Government ministers attacked Mr Latham over the similarities in the speeches.

"To make a speech on national identity and to be plagiarising the works of the American
president exposes Mr Latham of being nothing more than a phony," Foreign Minister Alexander
Downer said.

Health Minister Tony Abbott called Mr Latham a plagiarist and a hypocrite.

Mr Abbott said that in 1996, Mr Latham had accused a Liberal backbencher, Richard Evans,
of plagiarism.

But Mr Latham said the situations were different.

"Richard Evans repeated thousands of words in a speech," Mr Latham said.

"We are talking here about a couple of sentences, around which in my text there are
many more ambitious targets, and none of the words and none of sentences are identical.

"The content and the words are different in every single case, so I would have thought
that is rather self-evident in the difference between that particular episode (in 1996)
and what we are talking about now."

NSW Premier Bob Carr said it was not inappropriate for politicians to make reference
to works they admired in making speeches.

"It's quite legitimate in some circumstances to be inspired by someone else's speech," he said.

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