ANYONE complaining about the rising cost of living is just being greedy, former Opposition Leader Mark Latham claims.

Mr Latham said the public is really concerned about getting bigger houses, bigger garages and more four-wheel drives, and this was not an increase in the cost of living.

"The number one political issue is the cost of living pressures. That's just code for greed,'' he told a webcast conversation with La Trobe University's Robert Manne today.

"People just want more and more and more.''

In a discussion that repeated many of the views aired in his controversial memoirs The Latham Diaries, Mr Latham delivered an analysis of Labor's future and recent past.

Mr Latham also said Prime Minister Julia Gillard was having an identity crisis and people struggled to "deal with who she really is''.

He was disparaging of Ms Gillard's performance and of her ability to tackle climate change with conviction.

"It's too late," he said.

"Conviction comes from believing in something.

"If you believed in action on climate change you wouldn't have advised Kevin Rudd to drop the emissions trading scheme.

"And if she believed in climate change and carbon tax she wouldn't have promised not to introduce it during the election campaign.

"Conviction politics is not something you can invent or find at the bottom of the garden.

"You've actually got to believe it and do it from day one."

He said the Labor Party now stood for nothing, was dysfunctional, was out of touch with the electorate and had been poisoned by branch stacking and factionalism.

"The ALP is living on borrowed time," Mr Latham said.

He said, the landslide loss in the NSW election showed that branch stacking had failed, the party was mired in cliches and generalisations, it had lost its integrity and was controlled by a small, tight-knit group that inevitably misused the power it had gathered.

As he did in his diaries, Mr Latham wasn't reluctant to name names.



Prime Minister Julia Gillard came in for special attention, as did former NSW party secretary Mark Arbib and Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd.



Mr Latham pointed to the results in the western Sydney seats of Smithfield and Campbelltown, both of which were lost on Saturday to swings of 20 per cent or greater.



Smithfield had been held by Assyrian immigrant Ninos Khoshaba and its loss, according to Mr Latham, was an example of "ethnic branch stacking" backfiring.



"The real political contest was getting the numbers inside the party, not worrying about the voters outside the party," Mr Latham said.



"It was a classic example of the insular dysfunctional culture of Labor having a devastating impact on losing a traditional Labor seat."



Campbelltown was lost in a similar landslide as a result of an Arbib-inspired tactic of turning away from candidates with typical Labor backgrounds, Mr Latham said.



"They plucked this guy Nick Bleasdale from the air because he's a carpenter," he said.



"It might have worked for Christ and his family, but it didn't work here."



Scandals involving MPs rorting their expenses and accessing pornography on the parliamentary computers, something Mr Latham regards as fundamentally un-Labor, also played their part in the NSW electoral rout.



"All things that, I think, wouldn't have happened 30 or 40 years ago when the Labor Party had a grounding in real politics, real debate, real contest of ideas,'' he said.



"You didn't have to go through the process of imagery or ethnic branch stacking to be a Labor member, you could do it because you were an effective debater and propagator of political ideas through the local branch system.



"That culture has now gone and has been replaced by something we saw on Saturday that, in electoral terms, is a devastating flop."



If the ALP is to be rescued, Mr Latham's view is that it needs to improve its "abysmal" understanding of the Greens and to realise that climate change will be the major electoral issue for the next 100 years.



As for himself, the man who is now delighted to be out of politics believes his ascension to Labor Party leadership came too soon.



The same applies, presumably, for his descent.

Originally published as 'Cost of living pressure? That's just code for greed'