The ‘shameful bigot' is one man on a warpath against decency

Sydney Morning Herald

8 hours ago

Twenty years ago I had the distinction of being labelled 'the Abominable Snow Woman' (along with 'sick puppy', long before that phrase became one of Donald Trump's favourites) in Mark Latham's eponymous tome, The Latham Diaries.
My sin was to have co-written (along with colleague Damien Murphy) a 10,000-word profile of the then-federal opposition leader, which appeared just a few months ahead of that year's election. In sharp contrast to the way he was being portrayed as a Labor hero at the time, the piece revealed him to be an erratic, deeply flawed loner, intellectually brilliant but fundamentally unsuited to the role his party had entrusted him with.
It's easy to forget just how fervently Labor had invested its hopes in him back then. He was meant to be the conquering hero who would unseat John Howard. After the profile came out, I was dubbed a 'Labor rat' by one outraged party luminary while others rallied around to try and contain the damage.
It wasn't long, though, before Latham's true colours revealed themselves. After the ALP's shattering defeat in the October 2004 election, Latham attempted to lay the blame everywhere but at his own feet. By January 2005 his leadership had imploded – not helped by the pancreatitis he was then suffering from – and he'd resigned from federal parliament altogether.
The Diaries, published later that year, are littered with cheap insults, sneers and snide comments against fellow MPs, staffers and party officials of a kind the public would become all too familiar with in the years that followed. Towards the end of the book, he writes, tellingly, 'I feel like R.P. McMurphy [played memorably by Jack Nicholson] in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the only sane man in the asylum'.
By 2018 Latham was in open warfare against his former party, with ALP frontbencher Chris Bowen labelling him 'one of the great Labor rats of history' (rat being the supreme insult inside the ALP). Tensions came to a head during a heated clash on Sky News between Latham and former Labor senator and NSW party secretary Graham Richardson – aka the senator for kneecaps – during which Richardson accused Latham of being a 'King Rat' while Latham subsequently went on Sydney radio claiming that 'when Richo has a mates' reunion, it's at Long Bay jail'.
then-Reserve Bank governor and provocative comments about fellow presenters. The same year he parted company with The Australian Financial Review after being unmasked as an energetic Twitter troll. The paper denied he'd been sacked, though commentators noted the increasing unhappiness there'd been about his commentary on women.
Seeking a return to political life, Latham flirted with the libertarian Liberal Democratic Party before becoming a One Nation member of the NSW Legislative Council in 2019. Naturally enough, he fell out with them too. In August 2023, he was sacked by Pauline Hanson as state leader and then resigned soon afterwards to become an independent, accusing his former party along the way of misusing taxpayer funds.
Over the years, the targets of Latham's personal venom have been many and varied, from News Corp columnist Janet Albrechtsen (whom he labelled a 'skanky ho') to Racing NSW chief executive Peter V'landys and, most egregiously, domestic violence campaigner Rosie Batty, whose 11-year-old son Luke was murdered by her estranged partner, and whose integrity and motives he's questioned on a number of occasions. This masthead continues to get its share of Latham invective. In February this year he bestowed the label of 'grub' on Herald editor Bevan Shields, and on state political correspondent Alexandra Smith.
This week, we had another taste of Latham at his worst, when he sought to weaponise a late night adjournment speech in the NSW upper house against lower house independent MP Alex Greenwich, with whom he is locked in legal combat over a vile social media slur he directed against Greenwich's sexuality in 2023 – an incident that reportedly helped fuel Hanson's decision to dump him.
Last year a federal court judge found that Latham had defamed Greenwich (a decision Latham is appealing).
Meanwhile, Greenwich has separate proceedings under way against Latham in the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal for alleged homosexual vilification and workplace sexual harassment, and it was in the course of those proceedings that Greenwich's legal team submitted a highly confidential clinical psychologist's report detailing the harm they allege Greenwich has suffered in the wake of Latham's slurs.
Despite the report under being under a confidentiality order, Latham used it to launch not just a fresh attack on Greenwich but also on the psychologist, whom he accuses of preparing a 'totally fraudulent, bizarrely unbelievable psych assessment'. Greenwich's lawyers are now demanding an explanation from Latham's legal team.
An outraged Chris Minns also launched into Latham on Thursday, badging him 'one of the most shameful bigots in NSW'. He cited not just his attacks on Batty and the 'disgusting homophobic attack' on Greenwich, but also Latham's denigration of an 'out of control' Jewish lobby.
'I am reminded of an old adage: never wrestle a with a pig because you both get dirty – and besides, the pig loves it,' the premier said (Minns' ire has been stoked by the fact that Latham has teamed up with other non-Labor MPs in the upper house to challenge changes to workers' compensation legislation and join the probe into the genesis of Minns' hate speech laws).
Meanwhile, Labor's leader in the upper house, Penny Sharpe, has given notice of a government motion seeking to condemn Latham for what she alleges is an abuse of parliamentary privilege, both over his disclosure of elements of the psychologist's report in the Greenwich matter, and over another issue relating to a confidential report provided to the NSW upper house by the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission (LECC). She is seeking his referral to the Privileges Committee, in a move expected to be debated on August 5.
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Sharpe told the Herald that 'the powers that members of parliament have come with significant responsibilities. [Yet] at every turn Mark Latham has been prepared to use these powers and privileges to personally attack public servants, individuals like Rosie Batty, and personal vendettas that he has, whether it be with Peter V'landys or Alex Greenwich.' She added: 'The system of parliament in relation to parliamentary privilege and access to confidential material only works when people adhere to the rules; when it's undermined, it undermines the entire system of government.'
One can only surmise that Latham (whose parliamentary term doesn't expire until 2031) thrives on the controversy and the cultivation of his self-professed 'outsider' persona. On a perpetual warpath against what he sees to be political correctness, he also seems determined to repeatedly go to war against commonly accepted standards of civil and political discourse.