David Penberthy: Takes a handout rorter to know one, Latham
If the newly minted member for One Nation wants to lecture Australians about who’s scamming the handout system he needs to look in the mirror, not at indigenous Australians, writes David Penberthy.
Rendezview
Don't miss out on the headlines from Rendezview. Followed categories will be added to My News.
Some years ago — on January 19, 2006 to be precise — Mark Latham reacted quite unfavourably when Sydney’s Daily Telegraph dispatched a reporter and photographer to see how the man who almost became prime minister was enjoying life on the parliamentary pension.
That’s the same parliamentary pension Latham denounced as a rort during the 2004 election campaign, forcing John Howard, rightly, to abolish the absurdly lavish scheme.
And it’s the same parliamentary pension Latham still draws upon today, more than $80,000 a year, indexed until his dying day, despite his confected outrage at its largesse when he was trying to win an election.
On that morning in January 2006, Latham had what you could describe by way of an understatement as a brain snap. Approached outside a Hungry Jacks restaurant in western Sydney, where he was busy maintaining his lithe figure with a Bacon Delux after returning some VHS tapes to his local Video Ezy, the former Labor leader went berserk at the photographer, calling him a stalker and a paedophile who was trying to photograph his kids.
He then stole the camera, took it home to his shed, put it in a vice, and spent the next couple of hours laying into it with a mallet.
The camera was valued at $8000 and had returned intact from journalistic service in Iraq and East Timor, but was no match for an angry Latham in his Canley Vale shed.
I was reflecting on this episode this week when Latham and his new political bestie Pauline Hanson announced that it is the intention of One Nation to start DNA testing people who in their view aren’t quite brown enough and may be pretending to be Aboriginal to rip off Centrelink.
“Everybody hates a welfare rorter,” declared the man who once claimed to hate the very rort that now underwrites his existence.
MORE FROM DAVID PENBERTHY: Arrogance of the Catholic Church has been laid bare
And having railed as a public figure against the apparent intrusion of a completely legal and civil encounter with a news crew, he now wants private citizens to have their privacy and dignity trammelled by getting them to wee in a cup, to prove that they’re actually black.
The bloke is a card-carrying fraud.
It’s worth reflecting on his quote in full about the apparent crisis of faux indigenous welfare fraud.
“Australians are sick and tired of seeing people with blonde hair and blue eyes declaring themselves to be indigenous, when clearly they have no recognisable Aboriginal background and are doing it solely to qualify for extra money,” he said. “Everybody hates a welfare rorter, especially in Aboriginal affairs.”
Yeah Mark. It’s a massive issue. Everyone I know can’t sleep at night worrying about it.
It’s kind of sad to see someone who once had thoughtful ideas about poverty and education and the dignity of work just vanishing into the intellectual abyss with this fatuous pandering to the lowest common denominator. And that’s probably an insult to the lowest common denominator, as on this issue, Latham is lower than them.
By hitching his truly faded star to the One Nation bandwagon, Latham is embracing the racially-based stylings of the former member for Oxley, who memorably declared in her maiden speech in 1996 that something had to be done about the so-called “Aboriginal industry”.
The idea that there’s an Aboriginal industry — in the same way that there’s a film industry or a textile industry — has always puzzled me. What are the benefits it bestows upon its members?
When you actually look at the statistics for work, health, education and incarceration, it’s hard to see why anyone would want to claim fraudulently to be Aboriginal anyway. Are they in it for the diabetes and the glaucoma? The shocking rates of infant mortality? The suicides? The appalling levels of literacy, the high rate of unemployment?
MORE FROM DAVID PENBERTHY: Proof that most criminals are pretty stupid
These must be the perks to which Latham and Hanson allude.
You can have an intelligent discussion around the workings of the former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission and the extent to which it became an expensive and useless bureaucracy. Discussions such as that can inform debate about future models for indigenous governance.
You can also have a smart discussion about things like the cashless welfare card schemes, which have been trialled in a handful of predominantly indigenous towns and regions, as a sensible if contentious way of combating the scourge of alcohol and violence in those communities.
But the proposal out of One Nation HQ this week, peddled by a man who’s now light years from the compassionate and progressive political tradition, is the welfare version of eugenics.
Most of all though, it’s just a stellar example of what Latham does best. It’s bullying. Be it our photographer and his camera, that poor Sydney cabbie with a busted arm, or the innocent indigenous bloke bringing up his family in Redfern with a question mark now over his pigmentation, Latham is simply being the bully he’s always been.
You have to wonder what indigenous Australians make of this rubbish. You get the sense that they can’t win. When they achieve, as they so often do, on the football field, they get ridiculed and abused on social media.
At the other end of the spectrum, when they’re battling along on welfare, they’ve now got Mark Latham standing there like Nurse Ratched with a specimen cup, asking them for a quick sample to make sure their imagined benefits — whatever the hell they might actually be — aren’t the ill-gotten gains of genetic fraud.
If Latham had any credibility on the welfare question, he would confront the fact that, in his case, taxpayer-funded charity begins at home.
We’re replacing the kangaroo with this? What a waste of $10m
What happens when you get a self-serving mining billionaire whose fortune depends on the Chinese Communist Party to help rebrand Australia? A national symbol that looks like a COVID-19 cell, writes Miranda Devine.
Sorry for the scare campaign, the planet is fine
When a climate activist apologised for how environmentalists had misled the public over climate change threats, the fearmongers were not happy, especially when Greta is upping her fight, writes Miranda Devine.