Latham fears NSW ‘woke’ affirmative consent law will be weaponised

One Nation MP Mark Latham says affirmative consent laws passed in NSW last year will be weaponised in family court and child custody disputes after ­relationships break down.

One Nation MP Mark Latham has criticised affirmative consent laws passed in NSW last year. picture: AAP Image/Bianca De Marchi

Affirmative consent laws passed in NSW last year requiring proactive and ongoing sexual consent even between married couples will be weaponised in family court and child custody disputes after ­relationships break down, One Nation MP Mark Latham says.

“A couple in a long-term loving relationship in the familiar habit of waking during the night for intercourse without necessarily saying anything or gesturing consent in the dark are committing a crime,” Mr Latham told the Samuel Griffith Society conference in Sydney at the weekend.

“A couple who enjoy role plays in the privacy of their home with one person resisting seduction but then silently submitting are committing a crime.”

The former Labor leader ­referred to the Crimes Legislation Amendment (Sexual Consent ­Reforms) Act passed in November, which includes marriage and established relationships as circumstances in which non-consensual sexual activity can occur.

“The serious point is the new laws are [already] causing confusion on the bench as you’d ­expect. Inevitably, after relationships are broken down, these laws will be weaponised in family court and child custody disputes,” he said.

At the time the laws were passed, the NSW Department of Communities and Justice defended its provisions, saying: “It does not require a written agreement or script, or stifle spontaneity. It’s a matter of common sense and respect”.

The NSW government committed to outlawing coercive control in current and former relationships in December, in ­response to a recommendation by a parliamentary committee established by Mark Speakman, the ­Attorney-General and then Minister for Prevention of Domestic and Sexual Violence.

Mr Latham said such measures would break “the centuries-old legal practice of judging crimes committed at a certain time rather than general patterns of behaviour extending over decades”.

Under such laws “a man who said to his partner in 2014, ‘I’m taking the car for the weekend to go fishing with my mates’, then last year said to the same partner, ‘I ­really dislike your friends and we shouldn’t see them anymore’ would be guilty of a crime. This is said to be controlling the life of a partner by restricting the movements – the one car they have – and denying her access to see her friends who he doesn’t quite like. These are normal practices in life that are now being criminalised.

“This is the worst kind of activism, rewriting the statute book to criminalise events that when judged as stand-alone actions could be perfectly innocuous.”

Mr Latham, attempting to “explain the rise of woke virtue-signalling in Australian politics, especially in the Liberal and ­National parties”., blamed the new-found “wokeness’ of political representatives on the influence of the ­corporate sector, which “went woke” 15 years ago.

“Corporate executives … think they are saving the world through so-called climate-change action just before jumping on their ­private jets to Davos.

“Corporate elites now see themselves as social engineers remodelling the values and political views of their staff. For me, this represents the new feudalism, where bosses think they own their employees and control their lives even away from the workplace,” Mr Latham said.

He said the fight against woke elitism came in many forms: “It’s united conservatives, libertarians, nationalists and traditional social democrats in the defence of Western civilisational values.”

He put himself in the fourth category, “a traditional social Democrat who, after leaving the Labor Party, has gone home to the commonsense working-class politics that first inspired me in the 1970s”.