Joe Hildebrand: Why Mark Latham is the ultimate ‘Karen’

Two years after he went for drinks with a female friend, Mark Latham decided to publicly humiliate her this week.

Imagine, if you will, a bloke who goes out for a drink with a female friend who’s going through a difficult time and just wants somebody to talk to.

Imagine that she drinks too much and ends up needing to call her husband to come and pick her up.

And then imagine that instead of attempting to help out this woman in crisis, the bloke instead decides to publicly shame her.

As you can imagine there would probably be a four-letter word for a bloke like that, and in Australia we know what it is: Mark.

Because that is exactly what Mark Latham did this week to a female MP.

Two years ago NSW Labor MP Anna Watson had a drink with Latham at NSW Parliament House, apparently labouring under the misapprehension that he would behave like a decent human being.

Watson was at the time extremely troubled about someone she was very close to.

By an unrelated coincidence, I happen to know this for a fact. Disgracefully, Latham clearly did too.

By her own admission she drank too much at the parliamentary bar. And I can also tell you for a fact she is far from the first MP – or journalist – to do that.

One Nation MP Mark Latham. Picture: Gaye Gerard/NCA Newswire

Indeed, the only truly extraordinary thing about this is that Latham apparently sat with and chatted to Watson, and listened to all her woes, only to publicly humiliate her in a Budget Estimates hearing two years later.

It would be tempting to call this a dog act, but that would be unfair to dogs. This is the lowest of the low.

The only apparent fig leaf of legitimacy Latham attempted to apply was that Watson allegedly intended to drive home.

She emphatically denies the claim and there is no evidence to support it but frankly even if she did have to be dissuaded from this drunken folly, it would still make Latham’s conduct no less louse-like.

Again, it would be tempting to compare this claim against Latham’s laundry list of explosive transgressions but this too would be unfair.

He has disgraced himself in so many ways over so many years – assaulting a cab driver after a night out, smashing a photographer’s camera, assailing Asian-Australians for not speaking English – that no mere mortal could ever compete.

And that is the truly galling thing about Latham’s attack on Watson.

He was seemingly objecting to her role on an advisory committee that fed into a damning review of behaviour at NSW Parliament House – a review whose results I have publicly questioned myself.

Yet in shaming her for drunkenness he is guilty of the exact same wowserism he presumes to condemn. Perhaps we should switch out a letter or two in his name and call him Karen Latham.

Because then we get to the even deeper hypocrisy, which is Latham cloaking himself in the image of the all-Australian larrikin who reckons we should be able to kick back and relax without the thought police coming for us.

NSW Labor MP Anna Watson. Picture: Jane Dempster

I couldn’t agree more. And yet here is Latham using his own star chamber to publicly crucify a fellow MP for having too much to drink – with him no less!

What a dirty dibber-dobber. For a bloke who bangs on about all things Australian, it’s about as un-Australian as you can get.

In fact Latham is jumping on the bandwagon of the very people he loves to loathe: The censorious chattering classes who have committed all manner of indiscretions – both drunken and otherwise – yet delight in outing the misadventures of those whose ideologies do not comply with their own.

This is a newly intimate ugliness that has infected Australian politics, and we have seen it everywhere from cheerfully shameless tabloid websites to the august institutions of the ABC.

The question of what is personal and what is public has always been a fraught one for journos and pollies alike.

The general rule of thumb has been that if private matters do not affect official duties they are off limits, although infamous exceptions abound.

But in the digital age it often seems there are no limits. Consider the bizarre Four Corners revelation of a journalist who used the smartphone of a public servant to take a picture of a minister drinking with a staffer.

In this case we need only three letters to describe such fearless reportage: WTF?

Any number of ministers and MPs have had drinks and much more with their colleagues. Any number have got drunk enough to be in dire need of a taxi.

The same goes for journos and staffers and lobbyists and loyalists and pretty much anyone with anything to do with politics. Frankly, they were some of the best nights I can’t remember.

I could name a hundred names but I won’t. And that is the difference between Mark Latham and me.