Mark Latham Biography
Mark William Latham is an Australian politician, born on February 28, 1961. Since November 2018, he has been One Nation’s state leader in New South Wales and won the 2019 state election to the Legislative Council. Previously, from December 2003 to January 2005, he was the leader of the Australian Labor Party and opposition leader, leading the party to defeat at the 2004 federal election. Born in Sydney, Latham studied economics at Sydney University.
Mark Latham
At a young age, he joined the Labor Party and worked with Gough Whitlam and Bob Carr as a research assistant. In 1987 he was elected to the city council of Liverpool and in 1991 he became mayor. At the by-election of Werriwa in 1994, Latham entered the federal parliament. After the 1996 federal election, he was included in the shadow cabinet of Labor, but left the frontbench in 1998 after a dispute with the leader of the party, Kim Beazley.
In 2001, when Simon Crean became leader, he returned to the shadow cabinet. In December 2003, Latham became leader of the Labor Party, narrowly defeating Beazley after Crean’s resignation in a leadership vote. He has been the party’s youngest leader since Chris Watson in 1901. The ALP lost five seats at the 2004 federal election and reduced its share of the two-party-preferred vote; a fourth term was re-elected for the incumbent Howard government. In January 2005, Latham resigned as leader, leaving parliament at the same time.
He published a memoir, The Latham Diaries, after leaving politics, in which he condemned Australia’s general state of political life. Latham became a prominent political and social commentator after leaving the parliament. He started co-hosting Outsiders on Sky News Live in December 2016. His job at Sky News ended in March 2017 after making insulting remarks about a fellow presenter and the teenage daughter of a Reserve Bank of Australia governor.
In November 2018, after joining the Liberal Democrats for a short time, Latham announced that he had joined One Nation as its New South Wales state leader. He was successful at the 2019 state election in the upper house for the party.
Mark Latham Personal Life
In 1987, Latham started dating from his first wife, Gabrielle Gwyther, and in 1991 they married. In 1997 they separated and in 1999 they divorced. In 2000, Latham married his second wife, Janine Lacy, with two sons. Latham described himself as being a humanist. He said in an interview in 2004, “I am agnostic. I think there is a force, a spiritual world beyond the material, but I am not in a position to define it, let alone put it into some form of religious practice.
Mark Latham Early Career
Latham was born in New South Wales in Ashcroft, a south-western suburb of Sydney. He was educated at Hurlstone Public School; Hurlstone Agricultural High School, where he was dux; and at Sydney University, where he graduated with an honorary Bachelor of Economics in 1982. Latham worked at the Green Valley Hotel for 2 years while he was a student. From 1980 to 1982, he also worked as a consultant to Labor politician John Kerin.
After graduating from 1982 to 1987, Latham worked as a research assistant to former Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam, which included working on the latter’s book The Whitlam Government, and then as an advisor to Bob Carr, then leader of the New South Wales Opposition from 1988 to 1991. He was elected to the Liverpool City Council in the south-west of Sydney in 1987, and from 1991 to 1994 he was mayor.
Latham played with the Liverpool Bulls club as a rugby union and had a stint as its chairman. He’s also been a fan of the rugby league club St George Dragons since 1968. Latham’s term as mayor saw radical changes introduced to the council, with large public works expenditure to be paid for through a combination of loans and efficiencies achieved by outsourcing many council services. Public works have been highly praised in period accounts, including libraries, a pedestrian mall and public art.
Journalist Margaret Simons, who conducted an extensive investigation of the period, concluded in an article in Quarterly Essay (issue 15) that there were real issues in the council’s financial management. These mostly related to the outsourcing agreements being drafted.
Simons also said that most of the allegations come from members of the council who have been sacked by the state government for incompetence. On 1 June 2004, Latham told Parliament that he had reduced Liverpool’s debt service ratio from 17 percent to 10 percent during his time as mayor, which he said was less than half the average of Western Sydney.
Liverpool also said it had adopted a debt-retirement strategy that he claimed it would have made debt-free by 2005, but its successors did not implement it. Councillor Colin Harrington, who was defeated by Latham during the 1991 mayoral election, later said the figures were not accurate. He said Western Sydney’s average debt-service ratio was 12.1 percent and he said the financial staff of the council could not find any significant reference to the debt-retirement strategy.
Mark Latham Member of Parliament
In January 1994, Latham was elected to the House of Representatives by-election for Werriwa’s Sydney seat, which was Gough Whitlam’s seat from 1952 to 1978. After Labor lost the 1996 election, he was elected to the Opposition front bench and became shadow minister for education. After the 1998 election, after a political dispute with opposition leader Kim Beazley, he resigned from the front bench. After this incident, the two became political enemies.
The views expressed in Civilising Global Capital (see below) alienated him from many Labor traditionalists, but he was won by many admirers by his aggressive parliamentary style. He once called Prime Minister John Howard a “seelicker” and the frontbench of the Liberal Party a “conga line of suckholes.”[10] He also described the United States. As “the most incompetent and dangerous president in living memory,” President George W. Bush commented on politics in 2002:
I am a hater. Part of politics ‘ tribality is to really intensely dislike the other side. And the more I see, the more I hate them. I hate the negativity of them. I hate their stupidity. I hate the way, for example, when I know he has no real answers to the problems and challenges we face, John Howard tries to appeal to suburban values. I hate that’s phoniness.
Mark Latham Leader of the Opposition
Latham was a strong supporter of successor Simon Crean from Kim Beazley, defending the leader against his party critics. He called the three roosters “the main detractors of Crean’s frontbench, Stephen Smith, Stephen Conroy and Wayne Swan.” When the Labor leadership was resigned by Crean, Latham challenged the leader ballot against Beazley. Latham won the leadership vote by 47 votes to 45 on December 2, 2003, less than 10 years after entering Parliament. Early leadership contestants were Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, but both withdrew in favor of Beazley and Latham respectively.
At 42 years of age, Latham became the federal parliamentary labor party’s youngest leader since its first leader, Chris Watson, who in 1901 became leader at age 33. Latham championed his belief in a “ladder of opportunity” in his first press conference as leader that would bring prosperity to all Australians. The Howard administration targeted the brash personality of Latham and his colorful past. Howard characterized him, referring to a character in a children’s book, as “Mr Flip-Flop.” Peter Costello tried to damage the economic credentials of Latham by referring to the experimental economic ideas he put forward as a shadow treasurer, such as abolishing negative gearing and replacing the GST with a Progressive Expenditure Tax.
Frequent references have been made to the temper of Latham; he was alleged to have broken the arm of a taxi driver in a scuffle arising from a fare dispute.[13] Upon winning the leadership, Latham appointed his predecessor, Simon Crean, as shadow treasurer, while also retaining a number of supporters of Kim Beazley in senior positions. Beazley himself was re-elected as Shadow Minister for Defense to the front bench of the ALP in July 2004.
The national conference of the Labor Party took place in Sydney in January 2004. Latham received very positive media coverage during the conference and introduced his early childhood literacy plans. He introduced an unusual campaign style, choosing to focus on “values” issues such as children’s reading and economic relief for Australia’s middle class, which he called “ease the squeeze” with the political slogan.
Latham also put forward plans for reforming the systems of education and health. In contrast to Latham’s intense stagecrafting of the conference’s image, he boosted his profile through loosely organized direct meetings around the country in the “town hall” style. In opinion polls, Labor took the lead over the Coalition by March, and since Bob Hawke in 1983, Latham had a higher personal approval rating than any opposition leader. Commentators started discussing the serious possibility that by the end of the year Latham might be Prime Minister.
In March, after the Spanish election that defeated the government of the pro-Bush People’s Party administration, Latham sparked a new controversy by committing a Labor government to Christmas withdraw Australian troops from Iraq. There were about 850 troops in Iraq in Australia at that time, mostly involved in patrol work and training members of the new Iraqi defense forces. Howard accused Latham of a “cut and run” approach and said “not staying the distance is the Australian way.”
Labor under the leadership of Latham held a strong lead in national opinion polls until March 2004. Latham’s commitment to withdraw from Iraq caused a sharp drop in Labor’s leadership, but after revelations of prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib jail, Labor’s leadership increased again, suggesting that support for involvement in Iraq had declined, undermining the position of Howard. Labor’s “Christmas home troops” policy came under fire from the U.S. in June 2004. President George W. Bush, who described it as “disastrous” during a White House press conference during Howard’s visit to Washington DC.
Bush’s remarks raised controversy in Australia over whether Bush was interfering with Australia’s domestic political affairs, whether a Latham government’s election would threaten the U.S. alliance, and whether the comments were made with Howard’s prior knowledge. Shortly thereafter, Latham announced that Peter Garrett, president of the Australian Conservation Foundation and former lead singer with the rock band Midnight Oil, would be recruited as a Labor candidate in Kingsford Smith, a safe Sydney electorate vacated by former retired minister Laurie Brereton. Garrett revealed that senior ALP figures, including John Faulkner and Kim Beazley, had approached him months earlier and had taken that long to make up his mind.
Most commentators viewed his recruitment as a high-risk tactic, considering the potential benefit to the popularity of Labor of Garrett among youth as offset by the possibility that his record of past radical and anti-American statements might offend moderate voters. The second coup scored by Latham was the announcement that he would abolish the generous retirement schemes available to parliamentarians; his plan was quickly adopted by the Howard government in the face of a rising wave of public support with the support of his former mentor, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, who is a former Werriwa member.
Other announced policies and initiatives included: the introduction of parenting classes by the federal government for those parents who are deemed not to adequately discipline their children; a ban on food and drink advertising during television hours for children; the introduction of a national youth mentoring program; the distribution of free story books by the government to newborn families. Some of these initiatives led Howard to criticize Latham as a “policeman of behaviour.” Latham again became the center of controversy in July 2004 when it was alleged that he had punched a political rival during his time on the Liverpool Council on a commercial television network. The accusation was strongly denied by Latham.
He called a press conference on 6 July 2004 and denounced the government for maintaining what he called a “dirt unit,” which he said was gathering personal material about him, including his first marriage details. The government denied that any such unit existed, but some observers speculated that, in addition to claims that Latham was an inexperienced economic manager, researchers from the Liberal Party had accumulated more potentially embarrassing material about Latham that would be used during the election campaign.
Latham’s position in the opinion polls declined gradually between March and August, resulting in renewed speculation that Howard would call an early election. During August, Labor claimed a tactical victory over the government on the Australia-U.S. Free Trade Agreement issue and there were allegations in a Senate inquiry that Howard had lied during the 2001 election campaign about the “Children Overboard Affair.”
In all three national opinion polls, Labor was again ahead by mid-August. The election took place on October 9, 2004. Although opinion polls showed the ALP leading the government at different stages of the six-week campaign, with an increased majority, the government was re-elected. This was despite Latham being generally credited in the sole campaign debate with a strong performance and a victory. Latham was criticized in the days following the election for releasing many key policies too late, one example being Labor’s policy on conserving Tasmanian old growth forests. Among those critics of Latham were journalists Tom Allard and Mark Metherell, who said “the flurry of releases meant that Mr Latham walked off the message from the core strengths of health and education in Labor.”
Labor Party president Carmen Lawrence blamed the unexpected severity of the defeat on an effective “scare campaign” coalition focused on Latham’s limited economic management experience, and the whole thing. Apparently, Gartrell also failed to anticipate the scare campaign for interest rates. Latham himself, in the Latham Diaries, would later cite the inability of his campaign to counter the Liberal campaign as a key reason for the loss of the election.
Latham wrote that he had told his wife Janine that “I tried to carry the entire show on my shoulders: my family, my community, my party. But now I’m stuffed. I’ve collapsed under the weight of those fucking ads.”[19] Michael Costello, Kim Beazley’s former head of staff, said:” This is a complete train wreck. We’re now facing at least two terms before we can win the government again. The footage showed Latham seemingly drawing Howard to him and towering over his shorter opponent.
The incident was widely reported in the media, and while Latham claimed to have tried revenge for Howard squeezing his wife’s hand too hard at a press function, it was reported by Latham as being “aggressive,” “bullying” and “intimidating.” The campaign director of the Liberal Party, Brian Loughnane, later said that this incident gave Liberal headquarters more feedback than anything else during the six-week campaign, and that it “brought all the doubts and hesitations people had about Mark Latham together.”
However, Latham disputes the impact of this incident, having described it as a “Tory Gee-up: we got close to each other, sure, but otherwise it was the handshake of a regulator. It’s stupid to say it cost us votes–my numbers spiked in the last night of our polling.” According to Latham’s account of events, Latham came close to Howard for a handshake to prevent Howard from shaking his arm rat with him. Latham became the first Labor opposition leader to fail to make a net gain in government seats at his first election since Frank Tudor in 1917.
Some commentators, including Kim Beazley, said the leadership of Latham had saved Labor from a much heavier defeat. Beazley said polling in the House of Representatives a year before the election indicated that the ALP would lose “25–30 seats.” Instead, the party lost a net four seats in the lower house, a 0.21% swing, and a 1.1% swing in the Senate to the ALP. Labor’s defeat resulted in media criticism of Latham’s personal style and political priorities, as well as a crisis of confidence in his Labor caucus leadership. Several prominent front-bench members, including John Faulkner, Lindsay Tanner, and Bob McMullan, chose not to contest front-bench positions.
McMullan made it clear that he was unhappy with the leadership style of Latham and gave an interview suggesting a leadership challenge would take place early in 2005. The Australian Workers ‘ Union’s national secretary, Bill Shorten, was also highly critical of Latham. After Latham was wrongly reported to have blamed Labor’s state premiers for the defeat in December, an unnamed Labor frontbencher predicted a leadership challenge in the coming months, saying Latham’s supporters had lost confidence in him.
Latham also had a heated public confrontation with Senate Labor Deputy Leader Stephen Conroy, there would be a challenge to Latham’s leadership in the new year to renew speculation. The fact that there was no evident successor to the leadership helped Latham. Kevin Rudd, Wayne Swan, and Stephen Smith, the most likely candidates, accepted senior positions on the frontbench of Latham and pledged loyalty to him.
He was also supported by the leaders of the Socialist Left faction and the center-left faction under Martin Ferguson and Julia Gillard. There was little support for Beazley’s return, and neither Tanner nor McMullan were seen as viable candidates for leadership. However, in the longer run, many commentators doubted that Latham would survive after such a heavy defeat until the 2007 election. The final crisis for Latham’s leadership erupted following the earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean in December 2004.
The acting opposition leader, Senator Chris Evans, issued statements following the tsunami with both Latham and his deputy leader, Jenny Macklin, on leave. Latham was criticized for not issuing a statement personally as a leader, particularly at a time when John Howard expressed national sympathy for the disaster, promised Indonesia $1 billion in loans, and declared a national day of mourning. After the tragedy, Latham rejected the criticism of his failure to appear, saying “None of my verbiage could make any practical difference–bring the dead back, reverse the waves, organize the relief effort.” On 30 December, Macklin issued a disaster statement before choosing to take leave as well.
The January opinion polls showed a sharp decline in support from Latham and a preference for Beazley’s return as Labor leader. Latham announced his resignation from the leadership of the Labor Party and Parliament on 18 January 2005, citing life-threatening disease and family concerns. He strongly criticized the media during his illness for invading the privacy of his family. Since Billy Hughes was expelled from the party in 1916, Latham had been federal labor leader for 13 months, the shortest tenure.
After Matthew Charlton in 1928, Latham was only the second federal labor leader to leave politics without ever holding a ministerial office. Mungo MacCallum, a political journalist, wrote: Latham became a leader too early in his career, lacked the skills necessary to deal with the webs of intrigue within his own party, refused to massage the media, and the advisors he listened to were out of their depth against Howard’s praetorian guard. But he had many qualities not only desirable and attractive, but in today’s ALP, they are in short supply.
He might have developed into a formidable leader in other circumstances, including prime minister. He remains, as it is, one of the great ifs.
Mark Latham Publications
Although Latham wrote Civilising Global Capital as an MP, after his parliamentary career, most of his works have been written. While on Parliament’s backbench in the late 1990s, Latham published Civilising Global Capital: New Thinking for Australian Labor (Allen and Unwin, 1998), arguing that Labor needed to abandon many of its traditional policies and embrace the aspirational values (home ownership, higher education) of the upwardly-mobile skilled labor and small business class. His policies as the Labor Party’s leader were largely based on the position taken in this book, which is ideologically described as “the third way.”
Senator John Faulkner, published by Allen & Unwin, launched Latham’s biography Loner: Inside a Labor Tragedy by Bernard Lagan on 29 June 2005. Within Labor ranks, the book caused furor. Most of this was due to material in the last page of the book written by Latham within a single email. Of Kim Beazley’s return to leadership, Latham said: “Labor got the leader it really deserves–it’s well suited to a conservative stand-for-nothing type of leader.” Latham also criticized state labor premiers Bob Carr, Peter Beattie and Geoff Gallop, calling them “A-grade arseholes.” Union leader Bill Shorten remarked that Latham had displayed” all the attributes of a dog except loyalty.
On several fronts, it didn’t work out. But life goes on, spending so much time with my family, potentially in a splendid way. The greatest gift in my life after suffering from testicular cancer was the ability to have children with Janine. To waste it, I’d be a fool. Latham announced his decision to publish a selection of diary entries spanning nearly a decade soon after his retirement. After a bidding war, it was announced that the Diaries would be published by Melbourne University Press (MUP) late September.
MUP later granted News Ltd the exclusivity rights for extracts and the exclusivity for the first interview to Enough Rope, an ABC television program to be broadcast on Monday 19 September 2005 at 9.30 p.m. Meanwhile, The Australian published excerpts of the Diaries as of September 15 ahead of their release in book form on September 19. The published excerpts include attacks by Latham on the ALP, his successor Kim Beazley, frontbencher Kevin Rudd and former Labor prime ministers Paul Keating and Gough Whitlam.
Due to the advertising that the Diaries were now generating, the large number of published excerpts and concerns that Latham had recorded other interviews, notably with another ABC program, Lateline, Enough Rope published. When the time came to broadcast, however, the ABC announced that the interview would not be shown because of a legal injunction sought by News Limited (owner of The Australian), who had the right to publish extracts from the Diaries.
Night reports said any ABC broadcast was a breach of confidentiality between News and the book’s publisher, MUP, the newspaper publisher who signed an A$ 80,000 deal to publish excerpts from the book in weekend newspapers. The ABC, however, aired the Denton interview at 10.30 p.m. after the injunction was lifted by the New South Wales Supreme Court. Justice Harry Palmer said in News Limited newspapers, publishing large parts of the book largely destroyed the material’s value.
Due to the last-minute changes, the following night was aired the edition of ABC’s Lateline program scheduled for 10.30 p.m. with another interview with Latham (also subject to the short-lived injunction).[27] The Diaries represent a remarkable and unprecedented statement by a former leader of a major party. Latham scatches about the political system in Australia in the book: it takes committed people… And make them one-dimensional robots… The only good news is that they are being received by the public.
The electorate has worked out everything’s artificiality. Through the spin doctors, they can see the stunts of advertising, polling, and marginal-seat campaigning tricks. That’s why people are now talking with a cool anger about politics. They have a clear sense of the system being far from genuine. Indeed, the robots are tin men. At the end of September 2006, Melbourne University Publishing released Latham’s seventh book, a collection of quotations entitled A Conga Line of Suckholes.
In November 2010, Latham contributed an essay in The Monthly entitled “No Exit The ALP.” In it, Latham again criticized the ALP, writing that” the lasting impression from the Rudd years is one of emptiness for all the heightened rhetoric, for the seemingly endless creation of summits, committees, and policy reviews. He also noted that “Rudd’s prime ministry was an exercise in populism without a guiding philosophy of politics.
He avoided tough decisions and mastered the art of media manipulation as a way to extend his honeymoon.” Latham concludes that “Labor’s way was lost.” His suggested solution is that Labor again champions great causes, writing that: having studied literature and been part of these debates at one time, I can identify just three credible ideas advanced for the renewal of the social democratic project. Everyone seeks to stake out new ground beyond economic issues, beyond the material realm of politics. The first attempts to reclaim social capital as a labor icon, the reconstruction of mutualism and community.
The second positions Labor as an anti-establishment party, breaking down the socially entrenched power centers. The third champions a climate change crusade, a relentless attempt to roll back Western society’s materialism in favor of environmental values. Latham concludes his essay by writing about each approach’s difficulties. Mark Latham also wrote the agenda of Reviving Labor: a Local Reform Program (Pluto Press / Australian Fabian Society, 1990), What have you learned today? Building a Nation from our Neighborhoods (Pluto Press Australia, 2003), The Political Bubble:
Why Australians Don’t Trust Politics (Pan Macmillan, 2014), Latham at Large (Melbourne University Press, 2015), and Taking Back Australia: Saving Our Country, Our Culture, Our Civilization (Wilkinson Publishing, 2018).
Mark Latham Leader of the Post-Political Life
Latham gave his first public lecture since the Diaries was released at Melbourne University on 27 September 2005, entitled “Ten Reasons Why Young Idealistic People Should Forget About Organized Politics.” The lecture was filled to capacity, a remarkable occurrence. During the lecture, he argued that organized politics was ineffective in achieving real social change due to public apathy, the rise of conservatism and the main parties ‘ inward-focused structure, and instead encouraged young people to focus on more grassroots, community-based programs.
He also claimed that politics had a detrimental impact on health, happiness, and family life, largely blaming both the “arrogant” and “incompetent” media and internal party struggles. On Thursday, January 19, 2006, when he was photographed by Ross Schultz, a photographer from The Daily Telegraph, Latham was eating with his two sons at a Hungry Jack restaurant in Campbelltown, New South Wales. Schultz claimed the camera was snatched and smashed by Latham without destroying the electronic media containing the photographs. It was reported that Latham, presumably because he thought Schultz had taken pictures of his sons, called Schultz a paedophile.
The Telegraph subsequently announced plans for the upcoming publication of the photographic images in the edition of the following Saturday and that the replacement of the equipment would seek $12,000 from Latham. The next day, at his home in Sydney, Latham appeared to drive toward a Channel 7 TV cameraman. The photographer was unhurt, but the news head of Seven in Sydney, Chris Willis, said the footage showed Latham’s veer towards the cameraman as he was standing on the side of the road.
In February 2006, in connection with the incident, Latham was charged with assault, malicious damage and theft. Latham did not appear at Campbelltown Local Court on March 22 to face the charges, but instead gave a lecture to Australian National University political science students. When asked by a student how he could blame anyone other than himself, Latham answered: “I’m sorry I haven’t come here and expose myself as a miserable arsewipe.”
The Sydney Morning Herald reported on April 26 that Latham again chose not to appear at Campbelltown Local Court in connection with the incident on January 19. The case was adjourned to 24 May.[35] On 6 June, The Sydney Morning Herald reported that Latham had escaped a criminal conviction for malicious damage to the camera recorded against him by Schultz, but had been placed on a good bond of behavior for two years. He had dropped the charges of assault and theft after pleading guilty of malicious damage.
He was also required to pay the damaged camera for $6,763.70. On August 13, 2006, the Sun Herald reported that the family had moved from their Glen Alpine home to a Mount Hunter property near Camden. He commented with an article in the Australian Financial Review on the 2007 federal election campaign, in which he said Australia had a “Seinfeld election, a show about nothing.” Latham wrote that, regardless of which party won, Australia would have a decentralized, productivity-based, conservative economic policy and an industrial relations system.
He said that Australian public life had reached the “zenith of political convergence” and that “many people in the Labor movement expect Labor in power to be far more progressive than their stated promises of election. I expect a Labor administration to be even more timid, more conservative.” Latham was a 60 Minutes TV show guest reporter in 2010, reporting on the federal election campaign. It was here that he faced Julia Gillard during a report.
Latham pushed through the crowd and confronted Gillard and her partner, Tim Mathieson, saying, “I understand that you complained that I was working for Channel 9.” Gillard replied, “I don’t know anything about it, Mark. If you’re going to work with Channel 9, that’s a matter for you,” before Latham suggested that Kevin Rudd was behind the leaks in the campaign against her. During the campaign, Latham attacked Gillard’s position on population growth as “a fraud,” arguing that the Gillard government would have to reduce immigration levels if it were serious about relieving population pressures in the capital cities of Australia.
He also caused a stir when he urged voters to cast a protest vote on 60 Minutes by leaving the ballot paper blank on election day: they say voting in Australia is compulsory, but filling out the ballot paper is not compulsory. You can put it completely blank in the ballot box. That’s what I’m going to do on Saturday and I urge you to do the same thing. It’s the final vote of protest. He continued to attack Gillard and journalist Laurie Oakes after that interview. The 3AW radio station in Melbourne interviewed Latham during the federal election campaign on 14 August 2013. When asked to comment on the characterization of Fiona Scott, the Liberal candidate for Lindsay, by Liberal Party leader Tony Abbott, he caused controversy as having “sex appeal.” Latham answered: It has shown very bad judgment, it has shown that it has low standards. I looked at Fiona Scott well[…] and I don’t think she’s got any sex appeal. […] Abbott] must have had the beer goggles on because she’s not that good of a kind, and I’d rather have a prime minister’s aspirant who’s a good judge when it comes to checking out the right kinds. After spending eight years with the Australian Financial Review, Latham resigned from his regular column in August 2015.
His resignation was linked to a series of articles critical of Australian of the Year Rosie Batty and also Group Captain Catherine McGregor. In January 2016, further controversy broke out over Latham’s radio podcast on Triple M with comments he paraphrased from a Gov. Since the broadcast of Latham’s podcast, there have been widespread calls for White Ribbon to distance itself from Triple M and Latham. White Ribbon chair John Rosewarn replied that “Mark Latham’s views on domestic violence, as aired by Triple M, show his lack of understanding and knowledge of this complex issue, including its prevalence, causes and response to the community”. Latham has been working as a journalist and political and social commentator since his departure from politics and has appeared on numerous panel programs including Sunrise on the Seven Network and The Verdict on the Nine Network.
In 2016, Latham became co-hostof Jones + Co Sky News Live programs and co-hostof Outsiders in 2017. Latham criticized a lack of diversity among corporate diversity officers in a March edition of Outsiders and included as an example the wife of Sky News colleague Peter van Onselen. Latham was criticized for the segment by van Onselen and his To ThePoint co-host Kristina Keneally. Latham responded by criticizing both, including negative statements about Keneally’s record as New South Wales Premier. Keneally threatened to take defamation action and made a formal complaint to Sky News management. ABC Radio Sydney presenter Wendy Harmer initiated legal action in a separate incident after Latham made numerous statements criticizing her. No offense was meant, it was not supposed to have taken any. It’s really appalling that people who were suddenly complaining about nothing at the time get worked up later on… Latham launched a website called Mark Latham’s Outsiders in April 2017 and hosts a weekly Facebook Live program.
Despite sharing the same name, it is unrelated to the Outsiders Sky News program that continued without him as a host. Latham joined The Rebel Media as a commentator in June 2017. That same month, Latham attracted further controversy when he claimed that same-sex marriage dominated media coverage despite the small number of people in such unions and blamed gay travel.
Mark Latham Return to Politics
Latham announced in May 2017 that he would join the Liberal Democrats, a libertarian party, via his Facebook page. After a motion was passed by the Labor Party’s New South Wales branch, the Labor Party responded by placing a life ban on Latham from ever joining the party. According to Latham, after being denied permission to address a party gathering, he had terminated his ALP membership in March 2017.
Latham also announced that in future elections he was open to running as a Liberal Democrats candidate. He was blocked from running as a candidate by the party executive, however, and consequently resigned his party membership in September 2018. Latham announced in November 2018 that he had joined One Nation as the New South Wales state leader of the party and would stand for the 2019 state election Legislative Council.
In response, one-nation candidates were ruled out by Luke Foley, the leader of the state ALP. Latham ran on a platform opposing immigration, congestion, overdevelopment, and renewable energy, proposing DNA testing for Aboriginal welfare recipients and banning the burqa in government buildings. Latham won an eight-year term in the Legislative Council in his bid to return to parliament.
Mark Latham Political Positions
Latham supports travel ban on certain Islamic countries, saying, “If you know there’s a country that’s producing a lot of troublemakers, prospective terrorists, radical jihadists coming to Australia, what kind of sane nation would say,’ Bring them in!’ If you know there’s a nation that isn’t good for us, then turn off the tap.” Latham supports banning the burqa in government buildings, banks, and a government building. Latham is opposed to marriage of the same sex. In 2017, he endorsed the NO vote during the Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey.