Former Labor leader turned right-wing internet commentator Mark Latham has suffered a significant blow in the defamation case he is fighting against ABC employee Osman Faruqi, with his entire defence being thrown out by a judge.
Faruqi is suing Latham over an August 2017 video published on the Mark Latham's Outsiders website and other sites, in which Latham made comments about Islamic terrorism and "anti-white racism".
Per the court judgement, Latham said in the video: "Anyone out there, on the left of politics in particular, that’s fermenting [sic] hatred of white people, the rise of anti-white racism in Australia, and also those fermenting [sic] the idea of an Islamic master race in Australia, they are aiding and abetting Islamic terrorism. They are giving encouragement and succour to the terrorist fanatics who want to kill innocent people in this country..."
He added: "Now there’s an instance of this earlier in the week, a guy called Osman Faruqi…"
In the lawsuit, Faruqi claims Latham defamed him by suggesting he assists terrorist fanatics who want to kill Australians, that he condones murders committed by Islamic terrorists and that he encourages and facilitates terrorism.
Latham is fighting the case, but had his entire defence struck out in a decision from Federal Court Justice Michael Wigney, handed down on Thursday morning. Justice Wigney described the defence as an "extraordinary document" that was "no mean feat" to come to grips with.
Faruqi's statement of claim was two pages long; Latham's defence ran to 76. The first line of the lengthy judgement lends some insight into the nature of the document:
"What does the martyrdom of Christians in the Roman Empire between the reign of the Emperor Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus and Emperor Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus Augustus have to do with a defamation action commenced in Australia in 2017?" Wigney pondered.
The doomed defence included large amounts of material Latham had compiled on Faruqi, including 164 of Faruqi's tweets, extracts from articles he had posted in his stint as the politics editor of Junkee, and allegations about his association with former Greens senator Lee Rhiannon.
The defence also cited the Lindt Cafe siege in Sydney and bombings in Paris and Brussels.
Wigney was unconvinced the tweets vilified white people. "Does Mr Latham seriously suggest that this constitutes 'anti-white racism'?" he wrote in response to one of them.
Wigney said the "central hypothesis" underpinning Latham's arguments was his idea that "anti-white racism" supports and encourages Islamic terrorism.
But the judge agreed with Faruqi that this submission was "fundamentally flawed" and said Latham had not identified any reasonable link between the two.
"That is because, irrespective of whether or not Christians were persecuted in the ancient Roman Empire, or Huguenots were persecuted in the French Kingdom in the 1500s, or Protestants and Catholics were persecuted in England from the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, there is no reasonably demonstrated or demonstrable link between the vilification of white people in contemporary Australia and terrorist acts perpetrated by modern-day Islamic fundamentalists," Wigney said.
Instead of striking out some parts of the defence and leaving others, Wigney concluded it would be easiest for Latham to simply "start from scratch".
This will "hopefully give rise to a more concise and comprehensible" defence, which Latham has to file by September 28, Wigney said.