When I read yesterday that Mark Latham was promising to raise Townsville's profile as a defence base, I thought he was planning a special assignment for the North Queensland Cowboys. As it happens, it's a promise to establish an infantry battalion and a parachute battalion in the city, which is situated - fancy - in the marginal Liberal seat of Herbert.

There are a lot of promises flying around from both major political parties in the lead-up to the October 9 election, and I'm simply closing my ears to most of them. Some promises will be kept, but beaten so far out of shape as to be unrecognisable when passed as law, some promises will be totally disregarded. That's electioneering.

I was a big fan of the Mark Latham style this time last year, but since he became Leader of the Opposition he has become a pale, watered down imitation of his former self. Trying too hard, I think, to shake off the taxi-driver episode from 2001 and some of his more colourful parliamentary rhetoric. He's turned into the soft, caring, conservative, Mark Latham.

When I say conservative I mean it. Latham is a student of the "Third Way" philosophy of Clinton and Blair, and a protege of Gough Whitlam. Strange brew. But the man who I used to think was trying to impersonate John Curtin is now acting and behaving more like another bespectacled political leader. John Winston Howard.

Latham is a thinker and an audacious tactician, there's no doubt that he has rattled Howard more than once over the past nine months. He has to be the man to lead the Labor Party to this election because no one else is ready. Kim Beazley will be a conscientious defence minister, even if a bit too much like a kid playing with his toys, but he is also the man who lost two elections as leader and then lost two leadership challenges trying to get the job back. Simon Crean is Yesterday's Man and really hasn't performed in the shadow treasurer role. Bowing out graciously at this poll would have been a noble exit for Crean. It's not happening. The next person to fill the shoes of ALP leader will be, I expect, Julia Gillard. Her time will come.

Latham, while he worries me at times, is the man we have to rally behind as our next Prime Minister if we want the foul ultra-conservative stench of John Winston Howard out of our lives. We should be proud, not retrospectively ashamed, that he called GW Bush the most dangerous and reckless US president in recent memory. We should be proud that he has raised the issue of child literacy to one of long-term national importance. And we should be over the moon that he plans to curb the absurd benefits that JWH has thrown in the direction of private schools.

There will be a lot of bullshit flying between now and October 9. Let's not lose sight of the fact that the Howard administration has proved, time after time, that it is manifestly unfit to govern, has a very cynical disregard for the truth, and has turned Australia into a humanitarian disgrace. And he is the only Prime Minister to take Australia to war as an aggressor nation - and did so despite massive popular opposition, contrary to United Nations resolutions and without bipartisan parliamentary support.