Mark Latham

He was the youngest leader of the party since Chris Watson in 1901.

Mark William Latham (born 28 February 1961) is an Australian politician and media commentator who is a member of the New South Wales Legislative Council.

Latham was born on 28 February 1961 in Ashcroft, a suburb of south-western Sydney in New South Wales.

He has also been a fan of St George Dragons rugby league club since 1968.

Latham's term as mayor saw radical changes introduced to the council, with large spending on public works, to be paid for by a combination of loans and efficiencies achieved from outsourcing many council services.

In an article in Quarterly Essay, journalist Margaret Simons, who conducted an extensive investigation of the period, concluded that there were real issues in the financial management of the council.

These mostly related to the drafting of the outsourcing agreements.

Simons also said most of the allegations come from council members who were sacked for incompetence by the state government.

He also worked as an adviser to Labor politician John Kerin from 1980 to 1982.

He was educated at Hurlstone Public School; the Hurlstone Agricultural High School, where he was dux; and at the University of Sydney, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Economics with Honours in 1982.

While he was a student, Latham worked at the Green Valley Hotel for 2 years.

After completing his degree, Latham worked as a research assistant to the former Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam from 1982 to 1987, which included working on the latter's book The Whitlam Government, and then as an adviser to then-Leader of the New South Wales Opposition Bob Carr from 1988 to 1991.

He was elected to the Liverpool City Council in 1987 and became mayor in 1991.

In 1987, he was elected to the Liverpool City Council, in Sydney's south-west, and was mayor from 1991 to 1994.

Latham played rugby union with the Liverpool Bulls club and had a stint as its president.

Latham entered the House of Representatives by winning the seat of Werriwa at the 1994 Werriwa by-election.

In January 1994, Latham was elected at a by-election to the House of Representatives for the Sydney seat of Werriwa, which had been Gough Whitlam's seat from 1952 to 1978.

He was included in Labor's shadow cabinet after the 1996 federal election, but left the frontbench in 1998 following a dispute with the party leader, Kim Beazley.

He was elected to the Opposition front bench after Labor lost the 1996 election, and became shadow minister for education.

After the 1998 election he resigned from the front bench following a policy dispute with the opposition leader, Kim Beazley.

He returned to the shadow cabinet in 2001, when Simon Crean became leader.

He previously served as the leader of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and leader of the opposition from December 2003 to January 2005, leading the party to defeat at the 2004 federal election.

Latham became leader of the Labor Party in December 2003, narrowly defeating Beazley in a leadership vote after Crean's resignation.

At the 2004 federal election, the ALP lost five seats and reduced its share of the two-party-preferred vote; the incumbent Howard government was re-elected to a fourth term.

On 1 June 2004, Latham told Parliament that during his time as mayor he had reduced Liverpool's debt service ratio from 17 to 10 percent, which he said was less than half of western Sydney's average.

Latham became disillusioned with politics and retired in January 2005.

After leaving politics, he published a memoir, The Latham Diaries, in which he attacked his former colleagues and condemned the state of political life in Australia.

After leaving parliament, Latham started a career as a prominent political and social commentator, and became highly critical of the Labor Party and left-wing politics.

He would soon gain a reputation for making inflammatory and controversial comments.

He also said Liverpool had adopted a debt retirement strategy that he claimed would have made it debt free by 2005, but it was not implemented by his successors.

In December 2016, he began co-hosting Outsiders on Sky News Live, but he was fired from the network in March 2017 after he made insulting comments about a fellow presenter and the teenage daughter of a governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia.

He left the ALP in 2017 and joined Pauline Hanson's One Nation in 2018, gaining a seat for that party in the New South Wales Legislative Council at the 2019 New South Wales state election and winning re-election in 2023.

Latham was born in Sydney and studied economics at the University of Sydney.

He joined the Labor Party at a young age and worked as a research assistant to Gough Whitlam and Bob Carr.

Latham returned to politics and joined the Liberal Democratic Party in May 2017, which led to him receiving a lifetime ban from the Labor Party.

In November 2018, Latham left the party and announced that he had joined One Nation as its state leader in New South Wales.

He successfully stood for the party in the upper house at the 2019 state election.

He resigned in the middle of his eight-year term on 2 March 2023 in order to run for a new eight-year term at the state election later that month.

In August 2023, it was announced that Pauline Hanson had removed Latham from the position of party leader for One Nation (New South Wales).

On 22 August 2023, Latham resigned from One Nation to sit as an independent.