Former Labor leader tells Philip Lowe’s daughter to ‘get some interest’ in the disadvantaged on Sky’s The Outsiders

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Mark Latham has labelled the 15-year-old daughter of the governor of the Reserve Bank, Philip Lowe, a privileged child who doesn’t care about the disadvantaged.

The former Labor leader turned TV commentator made the attack on The Outsiders program, which he co-hosts with the former Liberal MP Ross Cameron and the Spectator’s editor, Rowan Dean.

“And I say to the young Miss Lowe, ‘Get some interest in people unlike yourself: the disadvantaged, the poor, people who don’t grow up in the household privileged to be the daughter of the governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia’,” Latham said on Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News Australia on Sunday. “It’s called social justice and caring about others.”

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Latham ridiculed the RBA’s strategies to promote women after Lowe said he was motivated by his daughter, who asked him what he was doing to make sure women had equal chances at the central bank.

“I didn’t have a really good answer at first and she said, ‘That’s not good enough,’” Lowe, 55, told Fairfax Media in January. “So that made me think about where we’re going.”

Latham and Dean mocked Lowe for recognising his own “unconscious bias” about women and said it was “amazing” he was listening to his daughter.

“Her concern, the daughter of the governor of the Reserve Bank, of the one of the most privileged households in the country, her concern wasn’t about poor and disadvantaged people, it was about people like her, and Lowe has taken this up and said he won’t be making appointments strictly on merit, he’ll be shoehorning women in,” Latham said.

“He acknowledges that even though women are 60% of the graduates that he’s going to shoehorn the women in solely on the basis of what his daughter said.

“This daughter is getting a bigger say at this taxpayer funded institution than any Australian voter.”

Latham said it was ridiculous women were being appointed at the RBA solely on the basis of the “shape of their genitalia”.

The former federal Labor leader is already under fire for attacking his colleagues on air, including the former Labor New South Wales premier Kristina Keneally, as well as Sydney schoolboys.

The episode Keneally objected to, which is no longer available on Sky’s catch-up service, is the same one in which he made derogatory comments about the ABC broadcaster and comedian Wendy Harmer, who had called on Sky to discipline Latham or she would cancel her Foxtel subscription.

Wendy Harmer (@wendy_harmer) I subscribe @foxtel and I'm deeply unimpressed by some of @SkyNewsAust offerings.

Fix it or I'm off. https://t.co/INbwWfBFXN

“Wendy Harmer has put it out there on Twitter that if Sky doesn’t do something about people like us she’ll be ditching her Foxtel arrangement,” Latham said.

“Now Wendy, of course, we know her well. She’s a proven commercial failure, so naturally she got a job at ABC radio at the sheltered workshop there for all the lefties. She fits the criteria: she’s female, she’s got a disability – that’s what they mean by diversity.

“So we say to Wendy Harmer on this Sunday morning: get a life, love.”

Harmer wasborn with a double cleft lip and palate. Last week Keneally lodged a formal complaint with her employer after Latham attacked her on air, calling her a “Yankee sheila” and a “protégé of Eddie Obeid”.

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On Wednesday Latham came under more fire after it was reported he criticised a Sydney high school boy and called him gay in a 12 March episode after he appeared in a video supporting feminism for International Women’s Day.

“The boys at the boys’ school look like dickheads doing their video, total dickheads,” Latham said on Sky. “I thought the first guy was gay.”

The opposition leader, Bill Shorten, said Latham was a sad bully.

“He’s behaving like a bully and he should apologise,” Shorten said.

Sky News Australia chief Angelos Frangopoulos has been approached for comment.