This is one of the defining features of the lunar Right’s methodology. When their claims are exposed as empty, when the evidence doesn’t materialise, they fall back on an all-purpose excuse: cover-up, cover-up, cover-up… make no mistake: [Andrew] Bolt is Australia’s answer to Donald Trump — a devastating commentary on the moral and intellectual decline of conservatism in this country.

If we hadn’t belled the cat with our headline, who would you guess wrote that? Surely not Mark Latham. Hell, if we’d censored Bolt’s name, it could be about Latham. But back in 2012 and 2013, when Latham was a Crikey contributor, he had several goes at Bolt, (and other news corp commentators, whose ranks he has since joined).  Now, of course, his interactions with Bolt are far chummier, as he turns up regularly as a guest on The Bolt Report to decry our politically correct party leaders, halal certification, gender fluidity and a whole grab bag of the kind of Youtube comment worthy theories you want to hear from an aging white man on a parliamentary pension.

The grim ironies between of what he says now, as opposed to what he used to say make a sizable heap.  To push back even further, back to 1994 he spoke passionately and eloquently about the need to for the recently introduced bill to amend the Racial Discrimination Act to include section 18c (which Latham would later expend considerable energy opposing):

[the bill] recognises that it is part of Australia’s laconic and easygoing character and an expression of our egalitarianism to have these forms of racial tolerance. Most Australians do not pass judgement or express intolerance on the basis of race, colour, creed and culture. Yet a small minority of racists and racist organisations do express and seek to incite racial intolerance and hatred. We need to be vigilant in these matters, understanding the racial intolerance, vilification and violence of a small minority in Australia, and also understanding that, in the broad sweep of Australian history, there have been some unfortunate characteristics of racism that at one time held the majority.

Of course, there were always questions about Latham’s temperament and judgement — forget that attempt to hulk over John Howard on election eve, he broke a cabbie’s arm, for God’s sake — but he was also a policy wonk, a writer of some force and (never forget it) nearly our Prime Minister.

So when did this happen? As we did on his former Outsiders colleague, let’s chart Latham’s descent from someone whose major preoccupation concerning race is the protection of minorities, to fighting anti-white racism, and most especially, from someone who criticised the Australian’s Janet Albrechtsen for “hat[ing] feminism, describing other women as ‘totalitarian’ and ‘self-obsessed’ just because they support paid maternity leave”, to someone whose own description of “left feminists” would struggle to conjure that level of civility.

2010

It was during the 2010 federal election campaign tht Latham started making himself a public thorn in the side of his fomer allies. While it was not explicitly gender that drove his “bullying” questioning of Gillard, his claims (denied by the party) that Labor had made complaints about him working for channel 9 did betray the flowering of a persecution complex. There was no such lack of clarity when, in the aftermath of Queensland’s floods in 2011, he announced Gillard was wooden and lacking in empathy because she had chosen to preference her career over having children.

2013

During the 2013 election campaign, Latham managed what at the time seemed impossible — to criticise a sexist Tony Abbott comment in a way that managed to be nastier and more offensive. In response to Abbott’s assessment of Fiona Scott as having “sex appeal”, Latham said (on 3AW):

“It showed very bad judgment and it shows he has low standards,” Mr Latham said on 3AW in reference to Tony Abbott’s remarks about the Liberal candidate for the seat of Lindsay, Fiona Scott on Tuesday. I had a good look at Fiona Scott on page eight of The Australian today and she doesn’t have sex appeal at all. She’s not that good of a sort. She’s a rather plain ordinary-looking woman and Abbott has exaggerated massively to try and win her vote among the blokes …Tony had the beer goggles on and in politics they say it’s showbiz for ugly people and I don’t think she’ll be out of place.”

The rubble was loosened, and the avalanche about to begin.

2015-present

He spent much of early 2015 using his new found fondness for Twitter to troll “bouregouis left-feminism” — and then used his column in the Australian Financial Review to criticise domestic violence campaigner Rosie Batty (who’s son was murdered by her husband) for taking paid speaking roles as part of her campaigning, and referring to transgender cricket commentator and Army reserve group captain as “he/she”. In the storm of condemnation that followed, he eventually resigned from the Fin. But this only seemed to further unmoor him from reality, with a bizarre, profanity strewn appearance at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival following a few days later.

His fixation of domestic violence only grew, and his prolific media engagements meant there was always another job to put in jeopardy on it’s account — there were calls for his sacking from a Triple M podcast for repeating his accusation that Batty was commercialising the death of her son, and calling domestic violence a “coping mechansim” that men turn to when they have “lost their self esteem”. He also made the seemingly not unrelated claim that feminists do more harm than good when they “demonise men”. This remained his major topic of discussion across 2016.

Latham then took up residence in his natural post-politics habitat — Sky News after 7pm, where he snugly fit with the tone of outrage and self pity of co-hosts like Ross Cameron and Alan Jones. Perhaps sensing that his relentless attacks on Batty may be getting a little stale, and hadn’t cost him a job in ages, Latham switched it up, attacking his colleagues Peter Van Onselen and Kristina Keneally, ridiculing PVO’s wife role as a diversity officer and calling Keneally “Eddie Obeid’s protege”. Soon the gig was up for Latham — after speculating on the sexuality of a high school student in an advert about gender equality, he was finally turfed.

He swiftly started “Mark Latham’s Outsiders” a Facebook live TV show, the equivalent of scraping a barrel bottom until it’s worn away, and prolifically tweeting. Amongst a flurry of tweets on August 17 he argued that “[f]or many yrs in mainstream politics RACE was off-limits, until Left started narrative about “White Male Privilege”. Now racial chaos common.”

The assertion that no-one dared mention race before people started exhorting one another to “check their privilege” is patently, demonstrably untrue, and certainly would have been opposed by the member for Werriwa back in 1994.

But, of course, this is one of the defining features of the lunar Right’s methodology. When their claims are exposed as empty, when the evidence doesn’t materialise…