Tim Blair: Why the Human Rights Commission is like our desal plant

IMAGINE being on the Human Rights Commission. These poor drones are paid to weaponise pathetic Twitter temper tantrums, says Tim Blair.

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

EVEN the most degrading jobs generally have some socially redeeming quality. Without journalism lecturers, for example, who would babysit stupid left-wing teens through their awkward learning-to-read years?

That challenging task might otherwise fall to sewerage workers, hospital waste cleaners, parasite infestation eradicators and anybody else with superior literacy skills to your standard humanities student. Frankly, they’ve got better — and more profitable — things to do with their time.

But what of workers in Australia’s mothballed desalination plants, who are paid to turn up each day simply to make sure the pointless facilities are still ticking over?

Sydney’s desal plant was put on standby in 2012, only two years after it was opened, because dam-filling rain had made the thing redundant.

Yet still it costs around $500,000 per day to keep this monument to climate panic in functioning order. Presumably the salaries of those involved are sufficient compensation for jobs that otherwise must be among the most soul-destroying ever devised.

The only purpose in working at Sydney’s desal plant is to keep the desal plant working.

It doesn’t do anything besides exist and cost money. It is the water production equivalent of a South Australian senator.

The Desalination Plant at Kurnell. Picture: John Feder/The Australian

Well, perhaps that’s going too far. There is a vague possibility that in future decades our various dormant desal plants, our hydro Kardashians, may occasionally be needed to top up the nation’s water supply for a week or so during a dry spell. It’s a little like installing a $12 billion security system in a $400,000 beach shack, but there you go.

Incredibly, there are even lamer gigs than clocking on at a desal plant and monitoring gauges for a few hours. Imagine the utter emptiness of being on the Human Rights Commission. These poor drones are paid to do nothing more than weaponise pathetic Twitter temper tantrums, a fact made obvious last year when the HRC’s Race Discrimination ­Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane ­encouraged people via Twitter to lodge complaints with the commission about Bill Leak’s celebrated depiction of Aboriginal neglect.

“Our society shouldn’t endorse racial stereotyping of ­Aboriginal Australians — or, for that matter, any other group,” Soutphommasane wrote.

In the evasive manner of HRC president Gillian Triggs, Soupdujour later denied that his remark was in any way prejudicial. “There’s no prejudgement that I make,” he told a Senate inquiry, before offering one of the all-time classic examples of dumb-arse doublespeak.

“Cartoons will be subject to all matter of public debate,” he said. “It’s a healthy part of our democracy that we have that debate.”

Bill Leak’s wife Goong, who ran to her husband’s aid a week ago when he was stricken by the heart attack that killed him, might dispute exactly how healthy that debate was. She might also question how the quasi-official pursuit of a cartoonist was in fact any kind of a debate at all. Debates don’t often feature legal fees.

The Australian's editorial cartoonist Bill Leak.

Still, Soupy sails on. Lord only knows who could be his next target. Perhaps AFL footballer Max Gawn might face cultural appropriation charges over that Mohammed-style beard of his, or someone with indigenous and relationship issues will be triggered by a Coon singles wrapper.

At least his boss is on her way out. As of July, Triggs will spend her time staring at walls and humming to herself. It’ll be a step up from her five-year stretch at the HRC, a tenure marked by repeated strategic blunders and verbal missteps. Triggs achieved the rare distinction as HRC prez of making almost as many corrections to her Senate estimates appearances as she did appearances themselves.

The final demand made of Bill Leak by Triggs was for a retraction. “I received the most bizarre request from her that I publish what she called a ‘correction’ to the effect that I did not think that she had misled the Senate,” Leak told The Bolt Report during his recent book launch.

“I was baffled by it and I still am.”

So was Buzzfeed’s Mark Di Stefano, who when covering last week’s Leak memorial at Sydney Town Hall found himself surrounded by people open in their hostility to the HRC.

“Barry Humphries says he doesn’t enjoy memorials, ‘the only one I’ll ever enjoy is the funeral of the Human Rights Commission’,” PC ragebunny Di Stefano reported, noting with astonishment the crowd’s reaction: “HUGE CHEERS.”

Bill Leak’s widow Goong and good friend Barry Humphries after Leak’s funeral service. Picture: John Feder

Sensitive Twitter folk could scarcely believe what they were reading. “This outpouring is so perverse,” marvelled The Sydney Morning Herald’s so-called “cartoonist” Cathy Wilcox.

“Another old white man filled with hatred and bigotry. Hatred is their default position. And racism,” wrote an individual going by the name Hadda Gutfull.

Queenslander Trish was angry that Di Stefano had actually reported Humphries’ words.

“Very disappointed in you spreading this vile crap Mark,” she fumed. “Thought you were better than that.”

There’s only one solution. File a human rights complaint to Triggsy and Souper. They’ve got plenty of time on their hands, after all. While the rest of us have lost a friend and an inspiration, the Human Rights Commission has lost 90 per cent of its workload.

BIG WET’S DROWNING OUT THE CLIMATE HORROR DOOMSAYERS

THE rains that were never going to fall again continued falling in Australia last week, and the dams that were never going to fill are at peak levels.

Why, it’s almost as though all of that global warming panic a few years ago really wasn’t “evidence-based”, as they say.

During the intervening period, not a single disaster predicted by climate alarmists has ever occurred. There are fewer climate refugees than there are NRL premiership trophies on display at Cronulla Sharks headquarters.

Australia’s climate horror forecasters look like fools. The same is true in the US, where then-Vermont Senate President Peter Shumlin had this to say about his snowy state in April 2007: “Any reasonable scientist will tell you that we’re going to rise anywhere between another two and three degrees in the next 30 years. That means that New Jersey’s climate is moving to Vermont in the next decade.”

Any reasonable scientist standing outside in Vermont lately would have been submerged by the state’s second-largest snowstorm on record. We finally have an answer to a question asked by a New York Times headline in 2014: “The end of snow?” The answer, piled up across the US in great mountainous loads, is “no”.

The new administration of President Donald Trump has clearly examined all of this and come up with an eminently sensible response.

“This comes back to the President’s businessperson view of government,” Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney said last week, discussing funding for climate change research.

“If you took over this as a CEO and you look at this on a spreadsheet, and you go, ‘Why do we have all of these facilities? Why do we have seven when we can do the same job with three? Won’t that save money?’”

Mulvaney then got to the core of the issue: “As to climate change, I think the President was fairly straightforward saying we’re not spending money on that any more,” he said.

“We consider that to be a waste of your money to go out and do that.”

A waste of your money. Has any government official in living memory offered a more succinct and precise definition of climate madness?

Even if Donald Trump achieves nothing else during his presidency, this approach to an international ­delusion should grant him a glowing legacy.