Coalition grills human rights chief Gillian Triggs over ‘misleading’ Senate committee evidence

COALITION MPs are questioning the integrity of human rights chief Gillian Triggs after she backed down from ‘misleading’ evidence she gave at a Senate committee.

Australian Human Rights Commission President Gillian Triggs has come under fire after admitting she misled a Senate inquiry this week. Picture: AAP

HUMAN Right Commission president Gillian Triggs has come under fire after backing down from evidence she gave at a Senate committee.

Coalition MPs have called into question Professor Triggs’ integrity and accused her of being “misleading” after she was forced to issue a clarifying statement to the Senate’s Legal and Constitutional Affairs committee qualifying claims she made on Tuesday, according to The Australian.

Professor Triggs told the Senate committee she believed she had been quoted inaccurately in an April 23 interview she gave to The Saturday Paper.

Human rights chief Gillian Triggs has been slammed for backing away from evidence she gave at a Senate committee. Picture Kym Smith

But after learning the newspaper had an audio recording of the interview, Professor Triggs told The Australian she was willing to “clarify” her evidence to the committee.

In the article, Professor Triggs slammed “seriously ill-informed and uneducated” politicians and said it was a shocking phenomenon that “Australians don’t even understand their own democratic system”.

“All they (parliamentarians) know is the world of Canberra and politics and they’ve lost any sense of a rule of law and curiously enough for Canberra they don’t even understand what democracy is,” she told the newspaper.

Immigration Minister Peter Dutton told Ray Hadley on 2GB radio on Thursday Professor Triggs would “would have to clear this up very quickly as it goes to her character”.

Mr Dutton claimed the Human Rights Commission president had misled the Senate’s legal and constitutional affairs committee when she blamed journalists for manufacturing quotes and quoting her out of context.

Liberal Senator for Tasmania, Eric Abetz, criticised the human rights chief over Twitter and said the Senate Committee “should recall her”.

The repeated examples of Triggs' public statements being less than robust are a matter of great concern - Senate Committee should recall her

— Eric Abetz (@SenatorAbetz) October 19, 2016

Originally published as Coalition grills human rights chief Gillian Triggs over ‘misleading’ Senate committee evidence