quoted as saying about Mr Latham in The Sydney Morning Herald. Contrary to Mr Latham's submission, the "retort" that the ordinary reasonable reader would understand him to be making is: "if you say I'm disgusting, what about the sexual activities that you [Mr Greenwich] engage in?"
133 Further, the sex act described is, as Mr Greenwich submitted, "an act that any human could engage in, irrespective of gender" and "[t]here is nothing about it that is exclusive to homosexual men".
134 In his closing address, Dr Collins invited me to look at the question of whether the first pleaded imputation about the primary tweet was conveyed by supposing that the word "sheila" was substituted for "bloke". He put his submission this way:
Could I invite your Honour to engage in this exercise. Substitute for the word "bloke" the word "sheila", the Australian vernacular for a woman, and imagine that this is a tweet by Mr Latham about a heterosexual male Member of Parliament. It would then read:
Disgusting. 'How does that compare with sticking your dick up a sheila's ass [sic] and covering it with shit?
Now, no one would suggest that that was a tweet that carried a meaning of the kind our learned friends contend for about heterosexual sex generally. No one would contend, contrary to our learned friend's submissions, it would be a tweet about a class of people as opposed to the individual the subject of the disgraceful remark, and no one would suggest that an imputation of the kind we plead, that the person engages in disgusting sexual activities, was pitched at too high a level of generality. You simply wouldn't have that debate, nor would we have a debate, if one substitutes the word "sheila" for "bloke", about whether the tweet carried a defamatory meaning.
… [T]o suggest that one would read it differently when one is in the context of an openly gay politician is an exercise in sophistry, which must have at its core a double standard, a prejudice, a stereotype. That's why we–when our learned friends say what the ordinary reasonable person takes from that tweet is some disapprobation of homosexual sexual activity, our learned friend pitches it at too high a level of generality.
That's not what it says. It's about a particular act, a particular unhygienic act, based on nothing more than Mr Latham's presumptions about what Mr Greenwich does in the bedroom …
135 Dr Collins then referred to Mr Smark's concession made in his closing address that Mr Latham "had no basis to know what sort of sexual conduct Mr Greenwich himself engaged in or whether he engaged in sexual conduct at all". Dr Collins submitted that the concession was fatal to the defences pleaded by Mr Latham (which I deal with later), but in the context of the question of the meaning of the primary tweet, he submitted that the "thought experiment
