Political influences
Today's political scandal concerns the Opposition Leader's apparent plagarism of Bill Clinton in a speech that Mr. Latham gave a couple of days ago. In that speech, Mr. Latham makes a number of remarks that bear a striking similiarity to those made by President Clinton in his 1997 State of the Union address. From Melbourne's Herald Sun:

In 1997, Mr Clinton said: "Every eight-year-old must be able to read."
On Tuesday, Mr Latham said: "Every infant child must be the beneficiary of reading programs."
Clinton: "Every 12-year-old must be able to log on to the internet."
Latham: "Every 10-year-old must be able to log on to the internet and manage information."
Clinton: "Every 18-year-old must be able to go to college."
Latham: "Every 17-year-old must be ready to extend their education into post-secondary qualifications."
Clinton: "Every adult American must be able to keep on learning for a lifetime."
Latham: "We want every adult to keep on learning for the rest of their lives."

The correlations are so astounding as to disqualify any notion of two speech writers stumbling across a similar way of expressing what are, really, quite non-controversial and bipartisan policy aims. I am inclined to agree with the assessment of Tony Abbott, who said in an interview with the ABC that "what's happened is Mr Latham or his researcher has gone to the Clinton speech and lifted with one or two cosmetic alterations."

To add another element to the story, the Labor Party has responded with an accusation that Prime Minister Howard is guilty of a similar offence. The accusation is that Howard lifted a paragraph from Kenneth Pollack's book arguing for the necessity of attacking Saddam Hussein's Iraq, The Threatening Storm. Bob McMullen made this statement today:

He quoted word for word from this book as if they were his own thoughts and his own ideas and he has been exposed monumentally. We have a case here of monumental double standards. The prime minister by his own standards owes the Australian people an explanation of why, without comment, attribution or reference, he based his case for war on the words of an obscure American academic and now pretends they were his words.

I am not sure how Kenneth Pollack, a distinguished expert on Iraq, formerly of Clinton's National Security Council and now Director of Research at Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, feels about being called an "obscure ... academic".