Piers Akerman: We’ve hit a Triggs-er point on mind control

OH, MALCOLM, whatever happened to the warrior for free speech that you once were? Now you’re in the corner of the discredited Australian Human Rights Commission president Gillian Triggs.

OH, MALCOLM, oh, Malcolm, whatever happened to the young warrior for free speech that you once were?

Remember when you proudly embarrassed the British government in the Spycatcher case, humbling Her Majesty’s finest and winning the right for retired MI5 spy Peter Wright to publish his ­account of life in the service and break numerous confidentiality agreements he had with his former employer?

You fought and won a battle for free speech, you had a British government ban on the publication of Wright’s memoirs (in which he disclosed faults within the intelligence community) tossed out.

It was one in the eye for the British Establishment, which you happily delivered (polishing your republican credentials in the process), when you were a young lion for liberty.

Now, you’ve flipped. You’re in the corner of the discredited Australian Human Rights Commission and its disgraced president Gillian Triggs.

Professor Gillian Triggs, President of the Australian Human Rights Commission. Picture Kym Smith

How has this come about, Malcolm?

The Australian Human Rights Commission has as much credibility as any of the tribunals appointed to enforce the official mindset of a totalitarian regime.

Professor Triggs, who was caught out falsely claiming to a Senate committee she had been misquoted or taken out of context in scandalous remarks she made to a Left-wing newspaper, has now had what ­remained of her reputation shredded and disposed of by Federal Court Judge Michael Jarrett, who on Friday threw out a case she and her AHRC spent three years prosecuting against three unfortunate students at the Queensland University of Technology.

The students were being sued for $500,000 in damages by an indigenous QUT staffer Cindy Prior over remarks ­posted on Facebook after they were refused permission to use computers within an indigenous-only area at QUT.

The claims were made under the now notorious 18C section of the Racial Discrimination Act under which ­remarks likely to offend, ­humiliate or intimidate are proscribed. Other students who were also accused under 18C paid about $5000 each to have the charges dropped, to make the issue go away so they could get on with their lives.

The three who refused to bow before the appalling AHRC, Alex Wood, Jackson Powell and Calum Thwaites, have suffered immeasurably from a sustained barrage of abuse as they fought to clear their names from false accusations of racism, even a false ­allegation of a connection to the white US supremacist org-anisation the Ku Klux Klan.

As Judge Jarrett found, Mr Wood’s Facebook post “just kicked out of the unsigned ­indigenous computer room”, was no more than an accurate statement of fact.

Mr Powell’s post “I wonder where the white supremacist computer lab is” was incapable of being unlawful under 18C, and Mr Thwaites had not ­posted the word “nigger” and Ms Prior produced no evidence to the contrary. Professor Triggs and her team of censors lost on all counts.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has found himself in the corner of discredited president of the Australian Human Rights Commission, Gillian Triggs. Picture Chris Kidd

While this farce was being expensively pursued by AHRC under the leadership of the $400,000-a-year professor, she and her Human Rights commissioner Tim “Soup Spoon” Soutphommasane were actively pursuing Bill Leak, without doubt Australia’s foremost political and ­social commentary cartoonist.

What’s most egregious is that Prof Triggs has now ­demanded Leak file some sort of explanation about the cartoon she and Soup Spoon find most offensive — a marvellous frame in which an indigenous policeman asks a somewhat dishevelled-looking indigenous man to have a talk to his boy about personal responsibility.

The dissolute fellow’s response is simple. “Yeah, righto, what’s his name then?”

Leak is being supported by his newspaper, The Australian, and News Corp, which also publishes The Sunday Telegraph. In the interests of clarity for the dimwits of the AHRC and all the censorial Leftists, I declare a lengthy friendship with Leak, who I happily ­believe is the sort of genius Australia needs to remind us exactly what we have lost in the cultural war with the politically correct ignoramuses being churned out by our universities and pandered to by the ABC and Fairfax media.

Astonishingly there are even some media professionals so blinded by their obeisance to this new cult that they support the appalling actions taken by Prof Triggs to close down debate and punish those who don’t toe the party line.

On Friday night, Leak ­reminded a small group of friends and supporters that George Orwell, that great ­exposer of totalitarianism, had written in 1941: “You cannot be really funny if your main aim is to flatter the comfortable ­classes”. In 1939 Adolf Hitler, Leak recalled, had been so sure he would conquer Britain he had prepared the Sonderfahndungsliste GB, a list of the names of 2820 people who were to be immediately arres-ted upon the success of the ­invasion.

Among the names was that of Australian/New Zealander David Low, an anti-totalitarian cartoonist whom Hitler loathed because he ­depicted the Fuhrer as the monster he was. Of course, no one is suggesting Professor Triggs or her offsider Soup Spoon are akin to Hitler. But history shows that freedom comes at a price.

The hapless and innocent students who were slammed by Professor Triggs now know that. The courageous Leak is discovering this to his cost.

There’s no doubting which side Alexander Solzhenitsyn, that doughty chronicler of the Soviet gulags and warrior against totalitarianism, would have thrown his lot in with.

But Malcolm, where are you? Vacillating.