Each week, Canvas asks a public figure to confess to three of the seven deadly sins. This week, Nigel Latta enters the box.
PRIDE
You've said that to be famous in New Zealand is to
be famous in "part of Sydney". You don't seem particularly impressed with yourself.
I think that's something you have to be on guard for. I noticed when I started doing this telly stuff that people treat you [differently] and I think if you were stupid, you might start thinking that you're more than you really are. It would be very easy to start believing other people's version of you and thinking that you're something special. My entire career, I have relied on working with a really good team of people because they are the checks and balances. I know how stupid I am, I know the dumb stuff I do all the time. I am intimately acquainted with my failings as a human being.
What are your greatest achievements?
My kids. It's the fact that I have raised two boys that I am really proud of and I think are really good kids and are compassionate and kind. Being on TV is a vacuous and empty thing really so the stuff I am proud about is - well, I was at a conference yesterday and an educator came up to me and said she was really thankful because I took a public stand and said, "Actually New Zealand is pretty racist. It's nice that we're being good now but where was everybody before?" That feels like something that's good. In my clinical career, when you're part of a team of people that gets kids out of care and back home again, that sort stuff is real to me. It's when we made The Darklands and a woman who had been sexually abused as a child and had never been believed got to go on national telly and tell her story and be believed. She sent the production company a note the next day saying that this enormous weight had been lifted off her because she had been believed. It's the real and palpable things that I am proud of.
SLOTH