That “trollumnist” Mark Latham, that “misogynist”, “venal”, “crazy-eyed moron” whose views should be “rejected and dismantled and kicked into the gutter where they belong” has resigned from the Australian Financial Review.
I could quote further of the many public character assessments of the former Labor leader, but you get the gist. That he has relinquished (or lost) his column is unsurprising. More astonishing is that it lasted eight years. Latham is angry, outrageous, insulting – with a lifelong chip on his shoulder – as well as astute, brave and far more readable than most.
Years ago, Michael Waterhouse worked with Latham in Bob Carr’s office in NSW, and said that his friend “wants to stir up the ants and cause offence. It’s for fun, but he also has a purpose”. Maybe in recent years, with little real public purpose, Latham just took to stirring up the ants for fun.
Yet I’m sorry to see him go, sorry to see those who have campaigned for his sacking to have their high-five moment (even if he went voluntarily), their view of what is an acceptable opinion confirmed.
In our weirdly censorious era, there are too many demands for people to be sacked or forced to resign, too many campaigns and petitions for people with unfashionable views to have their visas cancelled.
It’s dispiriting for a decorated scientist who says something silly and sexist to lose his career, or for an SBS journalist to be dismissed for tweeting his views about the horrors of war on Anzac Day. We need reasonable and orthodox views, but we also need dissidents and flame-throwers, even if they sometimes go too far.
Offence and “crossing the line” is subjective, but if a supposedly fake Twitter account called @RealMarkLatham was actually the real Mark Latham – BuzzFeed provided strong evidence that it was – then he crossed it, in my view. The tweets from that account to women including Rosie Batty and transgender military officer Catherine McGregor were horrible – bullying innuendo and unforgivable abuse, in Batty’s case, of a woman whose former partner murdered her son.
The furore over the “fake” account was only part of a months-long campaign to get rid of Latham. High-profile women in particular, whom he criticised in a mocking and sometimes nasty way, had been lobbying for his column to end.
Yet he had a go at everyone – it was his shtick. Footballer Adam Goodes was booed because he faked free kicks and brought leftist politics into sport, according to Latham. The Australian columnist Chris Kenny was mercilessly (and sometimes amusingly) mocked.
It was his views on “political feminism” that did him in, a subset of his attacks on leftist “elites” who cared more for identity politics than class-based politics. And it is his views on domestic violence, which he maintains is primarily an issue of disadvantage, not misogyny, which seemed to rankle most.
In June, Latham used his column to criticise Batty for being on the paid speakers’ circuit, “wheeled out at business functions to retell the story of her son’s murder”.
“This is one of my pet gripes about modern society: the way in which serious issues and events are converted into bizarre forms of celebrity,” he wrote.
It was offensive, certainly, but a view that needn’t be censored. Batty – now a public figure – is not above criticism. Many people would find her being paid for speeches a little uncomfortable. His substantive point was a critique of what is now the conventional wisdom – promoted by Batty and most feminist groups – that “engrained sexism and gender power imbalances are the root causes of domestic violence”.
“This is the Big Lie of feminist propaganda,” Latham wrote. “The data shows that domestic violence in Australia is heavily concentrated in Aboriginal and other underclass communities.”
Latham has written several times on this, and has been ridiculed as an idiot for it. Yet I have never seen a sustained rebuttal of his argument, because it’s essentially true. Not the whole truth perhaps, but he got to the heart of the most critical debate about how we should respond to domestic violence.
The problem with Latham is that he personalised everything. So he is contemptuous of middle class feminists whining about first world problems. That’s fine, but he didn’t have to attack Lisa Pryor, who admitted she copes with two small children while studying medicine through “caffeine and anti-depressants”. He didn’t have to totally go over the top, implying she was “demonising” children and shouldn’t have had them at all.
Pryor is suing Latham and the Financial Review over that column, which goes to a side point – what on earth were Latham’s editors doing? It’s an editor’s job to keep an eye on mavericks and save them, occasionally, from themselves. Yet it is possible, too, that Latham was unmanageable.
He had what was described as a “spectacular falling out” last year with Spectator editor Rowan Dean over Dean’s suggestion for a column topic. Latham described it as a “disgraceful piece of censorship”.
He won’t be dissuaded from his targets. In that case it was the Australian’s media diarist, Sharri Markson. Popular commentators like Annabel Crabb and Mia Freedman, who write about the trickiness of balancing work and family, drive Latham crazy too. He mocks them with their big salaries and au pairs as being out of touch with most women.
It’s a cheap shot, but for Latham, politics has always been about his western Sydney roots and his fury with leftists “enjoying the luxury of high incomes and cosmopolitan interests” while dismissing suburban Australians as sexist, racist and homophobic. He railed against the left’s lack of interest in tackling entrenched poverty.
He could have done all this in a measured and reasonable way, but surely there is a place in the media still for the unmeasured and the unreasonable. Surely there is a place for the bomb thrower.
Latham is a unique voice. Not pretty, but original. His most substantial contributions at the Financial Review were sharp insights into Labor’s thinking, politics and policy debate. Nobody wrote about that with more intelligence.
Yet I’ll equally miss his wonderful, meaningless feuds. Of Gerard Henderson, he wrote:
Gerard has an enemies list longer than Richard Nixon’s, usually on the basis of someone having disagreed with him some time in the past 45 years.
He used ridicule to fine effect when he took on the Australian’s obsessive campaign to bring down Julia Gillard based on what she did as a solicitor in the 1990s. He was astounded that the paper put on “nut job” Michael Smith as a reporter on the story. What’s next, asked Latham:
The next time Arthur Sinodinos appears before the NSW corruption commission, John Howard should be enlisted to cover the event. So, too, at the royal commission into Catholic Church paedophilia, the Murdoch flagship should bring in a special Vatican correspondent, George Pell.
The list is overflowing with possibilities: Sir David Flint covering the republic debate; Mary Jo Fisher on the crime rounds; Lord Monckton writing about climate change; Geert Wilders on multiculturalism; and Chris Kenny commenting on the ABC (oops, that’s already happening).
Few others would dare to write such a thing. Few would court such enemies with such relish. It’s a pity there’s on no place for him, for now.