Mark Latham has thanked his supporters and announced he will take leave until the upper house results from the New South Wales election are finalised amid widespread condemnation of a homophobic tweet he posted last week.
Labor has vowed it will not work with the state’s One Nation leader and asked the opposition to do the same in a show of support for independent MP Alex Greenwich, at whom the tweet was directed.
The federal Nationals leader, David Littleproud, has also taken aim at Pauline Hanson for failing to show leadership after the shocking comments.
Littleproud told Sky News that political parties had a responsibility to dump members when their conduct went too far.
“Where is Pauline Hanson on this? Why is he even in a political party any more?” he said.
“Where is the leadership of Pauline Hanson? All she’s done is gone to ground saying ‘he won’t call me back’. Well, take control of your party, call him in and show that you have some leadership.”
Littleproud said he called out his own party members during the pandemic when they were giving advice on vaccines.
“We have a privileged position as being politicians and if someone oversteps the mark, they need to be hauled in and they need to give an explanation,” he said.
“If their explanation isn’t good enough, then you have to have the courage and conviction to move them on.”
Hanson last week said the comments were “disgusting” and that she had unsuccessfully tried to reach Latham.
She has not commented publicly about the matter since then, and declined to comment when contacted by Guardian Australia on Monday.
Greenwich, the independent MP for Sydney, also called on Hanson to act.
“The party that Mr Latham represents in Parliament House is named after Pauline Hanson,” he said on Monday.
“Surely if she is so outraged and disgusted by his vile homophobic remarks, she’s going to need to take action to protect her own name.”
He said his social media channels had been “flooded with really graphic homophobic attacks” since the comments last week.
Late on Sunday night, Latham took to Twitter to announce he would be taking leave and would be “back when we finally get a LC [Legislative Council] result”.
Latham had posted and deleted the offensive tweet last week in response to a news article about a violent protest outside a church at which he spoke during the state election campaign.
In the article, Greenwich said Latham was a “disgusting human being” who posed a risk to the state.
“Disgusting?” Latham wrote, before making a graphic and homophobic description of sex acts.
Over the weekend the premier, Chris Minns, declared his government would not work with Latham at all and would not support any claim by Latham to chair an upper house committee.
“We’re not going to work with him,” Minns said.
“I’m not sure who’s going to lead the Liberal party in the next few months, but I’ll call on their organisation to make a similar commitment.”
One Nation slightly grew its vote in lower house contests but went backwards from its 2019 result in the upper house – its main avenue to influence.
The parliament was unable to discipline Latham as he had used a loophole allowing him to resign before the state election and run again for election, Labor’s upper house leader, Penny Sharpe, said on Saturday.
