ACU fails the university challenge: The sinking career of actor Firass Dirani

Kate Galloway and ACU vice-chancellor Zlatko Skrbis.

Is it so much to expect one of our most venerated academic institutions to tell the damn truth?

We refer to the Australian Catholic University and its flagrantly misleading response this week to why the Dean of Law, Professor Kate Galloway, was removed from her role just three months into her appointment.

“Professor Kate Galloway was not dismissed as Dean of Law,” an ACU spokeswoman said, in a remark we will shortly prove is totally false.

“As part of ACU’s strategy to enhance the profile of the school and build its global reputation for impactful research, Professor Kate Galloway was appointed to the role of Strategic Professor, Law and Social Justice.”

To colour her exit with the topspin of a reassignment is an egregious misrepresentation of the facts.

The university, of course, has good reasons to run a mile from this matter. It’s an outright scandal with grave consequences for its executive management.

For those unfamiliar with what we’re talking about, here’s a precis of recent events. Galloway was appointed in January as the Dean of Law and quietly lost that job in March.

The exact cause of her departure wasn’t made clear to staff, but at least one complaint had been logged at the time. An online petition had also called for a review of her appointment.

Galloway’s specialisation is property law. She is outspoken, a feminist, and her academic history includes advocating for law reform to abortion – a delicate topic at any Catholic institution.

This had clearly become a problem for administrators, and the plan they ginned up to remove Galloway is now exploding in their face.

To even claim the professor wasn’t dismissed is a shocking insult to intellectual honesty. Margin Call has obtained proof that she was given a severance payment of $655,371, an amount that was managed internally, for tax purposes, as an employee termination payment. Damages were also awarded to Galloway, to the tune of $362,000 and $80,000. Damages? For what? For an exciting reassignment within the school of law? Only a mook would swallow that.

ACU caved to ideological pressure and paid its freshly-appointed Dean of Law a million dollars to torch her own career, to correct a university hiring error. It’s a problem that wouldn’t have arisen if grade-school levels of due diligence were conducted at the selection phase.

A reminder, too, that ACU ran a deficit of $35m in 2023 and has been losing staff by the dozen, if not more, to accommodate its losses. Giving away another $1m under these circumstances is, frankly, appalling. Money, by the way, that would have been drawn in part or entirely from Commonwealth funds awarded to ACU, at a time when Education Minister Jason Clare wants taxpayer money to “glow in the dark” with transparency. A hush-money payment of this order stands in total defiance of that ministerial edict.

The genuine concern now, for ACU and for its Vice-Chancellor, Zlatko Skrbis, is whether this debacle invites an audit from the regulator, and whether this is all regarded as an unlawful discrimination of Galloway’s academic freedom, a trampling on her work in the realm of abortion. If it swims like a duck, right? Certainly quacks like one at this point.

Breaching the legal obligation to protect academic freedoms can cost a university its accreditation, but it can also put further Commonwealth funding at risk. The regulator, TEQSA, wouldn’t comment.

But equally mysterious is what ACU Chancellor and retired Queensland Supreme Court judge Martin Daubney KC makes of this palaver himself. Daubney is not an executive or part of the university’s management but he chairs ACU’s governance committee, known as Senate

The Galloway payment had been made known to the Senate, in a broad sense, but not the quantum, apparently, and perhaps not all the circumstances of why she vacated the role.

Asked whether he’d initiated an investigation, a spokeswoman for Daubney replied: “For legal reasons Mr Daubney is unable to provide any further information or comment concerning this matter.”

And when we asked ACU if the Senate was informed in full about the Galloway matter, its spokeswoman said that, like all universities, “ACU operates within a settled framework of delegated decision making”.

Delegated decision making? Weasel words if we ever heard them. Sounds very much like the buck stops somewhere, with someone … just not with anyone near the top.

Acting up

The acting career of Firass Dirani was already circling the drain when he began posting content sympathetic to Hamas and its “resistance” against women, small children, and unarmed elderly people in the days after October 7.

Firass Dirani. Picture: Getty Images

Not long after that incident he was reportedly cut from the cast of The Office Australia but, to be fair, by that point he was already regarded as a kook by many for his weird online musings, namely those around the Covid-19 pandemic, which he likes to call the “plandemic”.

Dirani’s views on Hamas and the war aren’t all that different or special to those of many others who now find themselves supporting a proscribed terrorist organisation. But on Tuesday he veered hard into the fetid streams of Jewish conspiracy, posting distorted snippets of ancient Jewish legal and theological writings to his sizeable follower base.

There’s nothing new in Dirani’s post. He just copy-and-pasted a page of quotes that have been promulgated for decades by the virulently ignorant and, just as often, the downright anti-Semitic, quotes allegedly taken from Jewish texts that, roughly, say all non-Jews should be killed, that the children of non-Jews are animals, that non-Jews are beasts, that a Jew who murders a non-Jew will receive no death penalty, etc.

Now why would he do that? He wouldn’t say when we asked.

It’s doubtful whether Dirani consulted the primary sources to verify these claims, or whether he’s just lounging about in the slurry of hateful garbage on 4Chan. The truth is that these Talmudic quotes have all been truncated, mistranslated, at times completely fabricated, and selectively picked and peeled from all their context. They’re on par with carefully spliced video of the prime minister admitting that he killed John Lennon; that’s the level of authenticity we’re talking about here.

Still, Jew-haters and baiters love these Talmudic warpings for a reason: they’re shocking enough and free to disseminate. It’s so easy, and it’s been happening for years – it probably will for many more. Not that we ever expected the former House Husbands and Underbelly star to adhere to any kind of scholarship for his followers on Instagram.