“Disgusting And Depraved” – Even Australia’s Far-Right Condemned This Homophobic Tweet
A tweet sent to insult and demean an openly gay male politician by his elected peer in parliament was so disgusting, crass and homophobic that it has even been condemned by those on the far right and from the same party.
DNA will not repeat the contents of the tweet, sent by Mark Latham, the leader of the One Nation Party in NSW, to the openly gay and independent MP, Alex Greenwich.
Even Pauline Hanson, the infamous national leader of One Nation has condemned the comments in the now-deleted tweet. On Thursday evening she said Latham wasn’t answering her calls or texts.
But Greenwich does not accept her condemnation.
“Pauline Hanson’s words are empty words – she herself just recently in the Senate did a motion that targeted the trans community,” he told the ABC on Friday. “[One Nation] is a party that is based on attacking different minority groups in the community one by one.”
He added that she was probably more embarrassed by the comments of her state leader than appalled by them, given her actions in the Senate have been “consistently anti-LGBT”.
Even right-wing commentators have joined the condemnation. Andrew Bolt called it “disgusting and depraved”.
Greenwich described Latham as representing a hateful and divisive form of politics with which he refuses to engage in the upcoming parliament to which they’re both elected.
“We’re talking about a person who adopts the cruellest politics from the US and tries to impose it in the NSW parliament,” he told the ABC.
He added that such remarks have only served to further embolden him in the pursuit of an Equality Bill to protect LGBTQIA+ people in an Australian state where “teachers can be fired or students expelled just for being gay in schools.”
After his voluntary assisted dying bill was, against all odds, passed by the NSW parliament last year, Greenwich was described as “the most disciplined, organised and charming advocate within parliament I’ve seen” by one of the country’s most respected broadcasters and advocates.
The Guardian reported that this marked “the trifecta of major progressive law reforms he has been instrumental in securing from conservative governments, alongside marriage equality in 2018 and the decriminalisation of abortion in 2019.”
On Friday, Greenwich was extending his trademark empathy to Latham himself.
“I hope Mark Latham is okay and has support around him and friends checking in on him,” he said. “These aren’t the comments of a well person.”
