Mark Latham’s day of drama: Scuppering Rosehill sale and ending his relationship

It was one of the most consequential days in Sydney racing history and Mark Latham was right in the thick of it.

The NSW upper house MP had furiously opposed the $5 billion proposal to sell Rosehill Gardens Racecourse for housing and, at the May 27 vote on the track’s future, he was there to see the plan thrown out.

Mark Latham leaves Royal Randwick racecourse after the May 27 vote on Rosehill’s future.Credit: Sam Mooy

It was a victory for Latham and heavyweights of the sport, such as Gai Waterhouse, who had lined up on the other side of an idea endorsed by Premier Chris Minns.

“It’s just embarrassing to think that they didn’t have it worked out before they went public,” Latham, the former federal Labor leader, said of Australian Turf Club officials as he emerged from the ballroom of Royal Randwick racecourse, where members had gathered to turn the scheme down.

However, it has now emerged that May 27 would not just be an important day for the state’s $3 billion racing industry and the Minns government, whose bid to find solutions for the NSW housing crisis was dealt a blow with hopes for a 25,000-home mini-city scrapped.

It would also prove a key date in Latham’s personal life, triggering allegations of threatening and coercive behaviour from his former partner, as well as claims he pressured her to participate in degrading sexual acts and sexual acts with others.

Latham and Nathalie Matthews at the races last year.Credit: Instagram

Latham has denied the accusations of abuse made by Nathalie Matthews in an application for an apprehended violence order against him, dismissing them as “preposterous”. He will contest them in court in July.

But what is not in dispute is that their relationship – or “arrangement”, as Latham put it on Wednesday – irrevocably broke down on that Tuesday night, just hours after the Rosehill decision.

“I ended it on the 27th of May. I said it was all over in the circumstances of that horrendous night. I couldn’t take it any more,” Latham told 2SM radio host Chris Smith on Wednesday. 

He said it had been their last encounter and they had had no association since, other than both retaining a small part-ownership share in a trotting horse and Latham returning possessions to her apartment in the city when she wasn’t there.

While he didn’t detail what transpired that night, Matthews has claimed Latham arrived as planned at her home during the evening while she was out at a business function.

She alleges he sent her abusive messages, insulting her for not being there with him. When she did arrive later, he was verbally aggressive and intimidating to her before leaving, she claims.

According to documents lodged by Matthews with the NSW Local Court, which the Herald has seen, she claims Latham then sent her more threatening and coercive messages and falsely accused her of aggression. She alleges Latham called her a “monster” and told her he had visited his GP to create a record of him claiming distress as well as making “unspecified allegations” about her to NSW parliament security.

Speaking on radio, Latham conceded sending sexually suggestive messages to Matthews while sitting in parliament at Macquarie Street. He didn’t comment about allegations that he defecated on her and called himself “master”.

But he said “just about all the things she’s complaining about, she initiated”. There were “issues that will come out in the court case” from text records between the pair, he added.

“A lawyer friend of mine ... said ‘back in the day, it was he said, she said’. Today the messages tell the story, and my word they will because there’s thousands of them,” he said.

Between a parliamentary inquiry, speeches in the Legislative Council and posts on social media, Latham has spent much of the past year taking aim at racing industry leaders such as Peter V’landys and Peter McGauran, as well as Minns himself, over Rosehill.

Now, months after helping quash the sale, he has found the spotlight trained fully on him.

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