The persecution of

Some journalists still smugly claim the persecution of three Queensland students proves the Racial Discrimination Act actually works. Didn't these innocent students finally get cleared? But now meet Kyran Findlater, who was bullied into paying $5000, and tell me again this law is not evil and Gillian Triggs should not be sacked.  

Some journalists still smugly claim the persecution of three Queensland students proves the Racial Discrimination Act actually works. Didn't these innocent students finally get cleared? 

But now meet Kyran Findlater, who was bullied into paying $5000, and tell me again this law is not evil and Gillian Triggs should not be sacked:

Until now, Findlater, a young professional with no interest in, or history of, political activism, did not want to speak publicly about any of these facts. He feared the smear of racism, and damage to his reputation, budding career in Canada and family.

He is sharing his story with The Weekend Australian because he is distressed at the idea he could be seen as a racist by those who do not know the facts. He believes Australians need to understand how innocent people are being harmed by misuse of what he regards as a bad law, section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, administered by an incompetent handler, the Human Rights Commission.

Here is how Findlater became one of seven students who were told to pay $5000 or be sued for $250,000 by a Queensland University of Technology staff member, Cindy Prior, under the Racial Discrimination Act:

Findlater ... went back and read what he had written on Facebook in late May 2013 after another student, Alex Wood, had posted about being ejected from QUT’s indigenous-only computer lab ­because of the colour of his skin...

Findlater says he cannot stand racism... Findlater’s Facebook post that offended Prior, after her ejection of Wood, an engineering student, on May 28, 2013, stated: “My Student and Amenity fees are going to furbish rooms in the university where inequality reigns supreme? I believe if we have to pay to support these sorts of places, there should at least be more created for general purpose use, but again, how do these sorts of facilities support interaction­ and community within QUT? All this does is ­encourage separation and ­inequality.”

Why did such a thoughtful post - one that actually rejected racism and did not even mention the staffer who sued the students - end up at the Human Rights Commission, investigated for race hate?

And why didn't the commission, headed by Triggs, tell Findlater for more than a year about it?

The commission’s president, Gillian Triggs, has claimed this week in interviews that the taxpayer-funded body and its staff had been working with the QUT students “in good faith” to try to resolve the complaint for some 14 months after it was lodged by Prior. But the commission’s own records show that claim by Triggs is false.

Most of the seven students found out for the first time in late July 2014 of the existence of the complaint. They were given just three business days’ notice to ­attend a conciliation conference in Brisbane. But nobody — not the human rights body, nor QUT, nor Prior — had ever successfully alerted Findlater.

Isn't that disgusting?

Findlater said the first he knew was when he saw the LinkedIn message, three months after the failure of the commission’s August 3 conciliation conference in which he was a named party. Documents show the commission had decided by late August that there was “no reasonable prospect of the matter being settled by conciliation”, ­resulting in it being escalated to court.

How, Findlater asks, can the commission be serious about “conciliation” when it does not once tell him there is a complaint? How, he questions, did it decide conciliation would not be possible when he did not know about it?

Read the lot. Prior's lawyer demanded Findlater pay $5000. He spent $10,000 on lawyers before decided the danger, the reputational damage and the expense was not worth it. He offered to pay $3500 because he had no money but Prior's lawyer was firm: $5000 or be sued for $250,000. 

He paid.

This law is a disgrace. It invites exactly this kind of stupid complaint and demands for cash with menaces. And, not for the first time, it is used to actually defend racism, not stop it.

It must go.