a politician tweeted something filthy about a gay mp, then fought it for three years. australia's highest court just declined to hear him. bye.

Photo: EqualityCWiki, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via AAP in The Canberra Times, the Star Observer and OUTinPerth

One tweet. Three years. A legal bill that was expected to clear half a million dollars before anyone even got to the High Court. Mark Latham has finally run out of courts.

On Thursday, Australia's High Court refused Latham, the former federal Labor leader, special leave to appeal the ruling that he defamed Alex Greenwich, the independent MP for Sydney, who is gay. It also ordered him to pay costs on the application, AAP reported. The court said the case "has insufficient prospects of success to warrant a grant of special leave."

The tweet, from March 2023, came after Greenwich criticized violence at a church protest in Belfield and called Latham a "disgusting human being." Latham's reply, per AAP, "graphically described a sex act." We are not reprinting it. A Federal Court judge found it defamatory and ordered $140,000 in damages, and Latham was also ordered to pay most of Greenwich's legal costs, which OUTinPerth says were expected to exceed $500,000.

Latham's argument on appeal was, essentially, that calling someone gay or saying gay men have sex is not defamatory. Three Federal Court appeal judges answered in June that most people would not read the tweet as saying only that, and Latham called the rulings a "woke, left-wing political judgement." The High Court has now declined to touch it.

"I'm relieved and grateful," Greenwich said, per the Star Observer, adding that the decision "reinforces that there are consequences for hateful and defamatory conduct, and that there is no place for homophobic abuse in Australian political discourse." Latham had not commented as of Sunday morning. (Greenwich is pictured above on the day of Australia's 2017 marriage equality vote, which is also the face we are making.)