Warning: This article is about Mark Latham and occasionally quotes him, so, unsurprisingly, it’s quite unedifying and includes swearing.
Georgie has written a piece about men and quotas, which is much more interesting and I would totally understand if you click out right now.
If you were lucky enough to miss the latest Latham meltdown and you want to find out what everyone is rolling their eyes over, keep reading.
The Melbourne Writers Festival, which took place on the weekend, had booked Latham to do a one on one with Jonathan Green on Saturday. Obviously this was scheduled quite some time before his spectacular departure from the AFR last week, and he was supposed to be talking about ex politicians turning to journalism.
Maybe there was a time when he could have talked about this topic and had something interesting to say, but that time appears to have passed. Instead, he spent an hour abusing Green, telling audience members to fuck off, and saying things about female journalists that even the people live tweeting the event were too scared to repeat. Defamation cases are expensive, after all.
Some excerpts of the session are available on the Radio National site, if you don’t like your brain very much and want to torture it a bit.
It was perhaps the longest public statement of “I don’t ever want to work in the media again” we’ve ever seen from an alleged journalist.
It would be difficult to pick the most distasteful of Latham’s recent activities, but perhaps the saddest aspect of it all is that there was often a kernel of useful debate in some of the almost-like-a-points he raised.
There is an argument to be made that we are over-diagnosing and over-medicating mental illness, there are definitely worthwhile discussions to have about the way feminism is used and expressed in western societies, we do need to encourage more men to see caring for children as a worthwhile use of their time, domestic violence is more prevalent (but not exclusive) in disadvantaged communities.
All these things could valuable ideas to bring to public debate. Doing so by directing vicious personal attacks at individual women is not only disgusting, it’s also likely to be defamatory and derails any understanding or sane debate of the topic.
I very much hope this will be the last time I ever have to write anything about Latham. I’ve heard some of the things he said on Saturday that we can’t repeat, they turned my stomach. I don’t think anyone who perpetuates such foul personal abuse should be offered a public platform, but it will be interesting to see if he can find anyone who disagrees with me.
For now, let’s bid Latham farewell.