AUSTRALIA’S TAX-FUNDED TRUTH TELLER

The Australian reports: "Outgoing Human Rights Commission president Gillian Triggs has told a Sydney conference that challenging government policy is ‘clearly not a good career move’."

Put a coin in the slot and the great truth-teller speaks

The Australian reports: "Outgoing Human Rights Commission president Gillian Triggs has told a Sydney conference that challenging government policy is ‘clearly not a good career move’."

How is smearing university students, attacking cartoonists and demanding compensation for child sex offenders and armed robbers anything to do with government policy?

“Perhaps it’s an important characteristic of a truth-teller to be somewhat older and not looking for advancement or preferment,” she said, drawing laughter from the audience.

I’ll bet it did. Pro tip: put your gag at the end of the line.

“The commission, in short, is paid to speak truth to power, creating an inevitable tension with the government of the day on some issues,” she told the conference.

Triggs collects around $400,000 per year of your money. Lesser commissioners, such as Tim Soupdujour and his mates, haul in $300,000 each. The Human Rights Commission is power.

UPDATE. Politicians are now speaking truth to Triggs:

The process of resolving disputes under the controversial section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act has become a “form of punishment” and is “not working well”, says the Nick Xenophon Team.

First-term Labor MP Matt Keogh agrees there have been “some issues of concern in the process administered by the Human Rights Commission” over the now-dismissed case against Queensland University of Technology students for alleged racial hatred, but he says section 18C is not to blame.

Malcolm Turnbull’s assistant minister James McGrath says “I’ve seen chook yards in the wet season with higher standards” than the commission, in his scathing criticism of the QUT case, which he calls a national ­embarrassment.

UPDATE II. Chris Kenny reports:

Australian Human Rights Commission president Gillian Triggs is under renewed pressure to ­resign after devastating criticism from a former human rights commissioner and formal notification she will be recalled to a parlia­mentary committee to explain her “apparently deliberately misleading” evidence last month.

These developments come as insiders told The Weekend Australian the AHRC was dispirited and divided because of the controversy surrounding Professor Triggs, while Liberal senator Linda Reynolds said she was “deeply concerned” about the president’s handling of the Queensland University of Technology section 18C case, which Senator Reynolds will pursue in the committee.

Just chuck her.