Mark Latham has emphatically denied allegations of abuse and manipulation made in court documents by a former partner seeking an apprehended violence order against him after her claims were reported in the media.
The allegations, which were reported on Monday night by The Australian, are detailed in an application for a domestic violence order filed with the New South Wales local court by Latham’s former partner, Nathalie Matthews. The publication said Matthews gave them permission to identify her but refused to comment further.
In the documents filed in support of the application, Matthews reportedly claims Latham engaged in a “sustained pattern” of abuse, including emotional, psychological and financial manipulation.
Late on Monday, Latham issued an emphatic denial about the claims, saying they were “absolute rubbish” and declaring he had not yet been served with any order.
In a statement posted on X, Latham said Matthews’ claims were “comical and ridiculous”, adding he had “scores of documents to show that” and would rely on those documents to defend himself.
Matthews, who runs a logistics company in Dubai, Sydney and Perth, is seeking an initial interim order that Latham not come within 100m of her, and a final two-year order, according to The Australian.
Guardian Australia does not suggest that the claims against Latham are true, just that they have been made in the course of an application for a domestic violence order and will be contested in court. The matter will be mentioned at the Downing Centre local court on 30 July.
The publication reported it was understood Matthews had taken the allegations to NSW police, but “they have not laid any charges or applied for an order on her behalf.” Guardian Australia has contacted the police for comment.
Labor’s upper house leader, Penny Sharpe, said on Tuesday the claims were “allegations, and obviously, I can’t make too much of them”.
“But I’ll make this point: the Labor government’s been calling out Mark Latham for several months now in relation to a whole range of different things,” she said.
“There is a real question for some of the other parties in the parliament that they continue to work so closely with Mark Latham on a number of issues. The Liberals and the Greens have been working closely with him in the upper house; I think they need to reconsider that.”
Sharpe said that when parliament resumed in August, she had two motions before the house, including one to refer Latham to the privileges committee over his behaviour disclosing unauthorised information under parliamentary privilege.
She said she also had a more general motion calling into question his overall behaviour.
“Mark Latham has some questions to answer on a whole range of behaviours,” she said.
In June, the NSW premier, Chris Minns, criticised Latham’s behaviour, after Latham used parliamentary privilege to reveal confidential medical records relating to NSW MP Alex Greenwich, who won $140,00 in a defamation payment last year over a vile homophobic tweet Latham made about him. Minns accused Latham in question time of being a “shameful bigot”, claiming the former One Nation MP had effectively ignored hundreds of antisemitic attacks in the state.
