Truth troubles Gillian Triggs and the Human Rights Commission

Does Gillian Triggs’s Human Rights Commission have a problem with speaking the truth?

Does Gillian Triggs’s Human Rights Commission have a ­problem with speaking the truth? And do many in the media no longer support free speech, and worse are they prepared to ­knowingly publish falsehoods in pursuit of political ends?

As News Corp columnist ­Andrew Bolt pointed out in his blog on Thursday morning, the list of Triggs’s interventions in which the truthfulness and objectivity of the commission’s work has been questioned is now long indeed.

That Thursday morning this paper carried on page one just the latest. Triggs claimed she was misquoted by Ramona Koval in a piece in The Saturday Paper, but that paper’s editor, Erik Jensen, said the tape showed the paper’s quotes were accurate.

Jensen should have been proud of his paper standing up for truth, but by Saturday he was publishing a mawkish editorial trying to excuse himself for causing Triggs a problem. And worse, in a page one story about asylum- seekers and the culture war, both the headline and the entire page three spill perpetuated the mistake made by the ABC’s Four ­Corners program on Monday.

That is the lie that people are being held in detention on Nauru. Physical detention was ended more than a year ago as all ­journalists should know, yet Four Corners showed people behind wire fences.

To my mind the HRC’s most egregious crime under Triggs was its release in 2014 of the Forgotten Children report into the detention of children under the offshore processing regime supported by both the second Rudd government and the then Abbott government.

Triggs admitted in a Senate ­Estimates hearing in late 2014 that she had discussed the timing of the report with two previous Labor ministers for immigration and had agreed to delay her ­inquiry until after the then forthcoming election.

The Abbott government ­rightly accused the commission of politicising its work when its ­report was released a year into the new government’s term. Labor had come to power in late 2007 with only a handful of people in detention.

It had softened John Howard’s Pacific solution and 50,000 ­asylum-seekers had come by boat in just over five years. The number of children in detention had hit 2000.

Labor, which appointed Triggs in 2012, had also presided over the deaths of 1200 people at sea.

Triggs’s report really did not acknowledge any of this or that the successful policy of turning back boats under then new Liberal minister for immigration Scott Morrison in late 2013 and 2014 had stopped the flow of ­asylum-seekers. Nor did the commission give the Abbott government credit for reducing the number of children in detention to less than 200 by the time of the HRC report’s release.

It is clear the answer to the first question in my intro is a re­sounding yes. And I think the reason the commission’s behaviour has so often been transparently dishonest is also clear, but less ­obvious to the public.

As this paper’s columnist ­Jennifer Oriel pointed out last Monday, the modern Left, motivated by identity politics and the marginalisation of the enlightenment ideas of truth, evidence, ­majority rule and rational legal ­argument, now seeks to obscure facts and downplay objective ­reason to achieve its political aims.

The commission was set up by the Hawke Labor government in 1986 and is just one of a series of extrajudicial bodies that seeks to drive a progressive political ­agenda in public policy through the development of new forms of international law and treaties.

But just as the old Left misjudged the appeal of international socialism to the working class and underestimated the attraction of aspiration and achievement, it seems likely the modern Left agenda will eventually fall flat when the wider public wakes up to what is going on.

Hopefully the commission’s decision a fortnight ago to accept a complaint under Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act over a Bill Leak cartoon published on August 4 will be enough to stir the public into action.

Many are starting to realise something evil is being done in our country under the guise of protecting the feelings of minority groups. The modern thought police really do have power.

Yet it is remarkable how few in the media have been prepared to defend either Leak or, five years earlier, Bolt, who was prosecuted over two articles he wrote about part-Aboriginals. While there have been honourable exceptions in the past fortnight such as Brett McCarthy, editor of The West Australian newspaper, and his ­editor-in-chief Bob Cronin, the ABC and Fairfax have for a couple of years largely ignored the behaviour of Triggs, who they see as a compassionate fighter against an unjust asylum seeker detention system.

So what does the Leak investigation tell us about the commission and the media’s attitude to free speech?

First, the HRC is more inter­ested in the hurt feelings of Aboriginal people who take care of their children than it is in the ­actual fate of children in the criminal justice system who have been the victims of family dysfunction. Remember the catalyst for the cartoon was Four Corners’ rev­elations about Darwin juvenile ­offender Dylan Voller and the Don Dale Detention Centre.

Second, it says HRC commissioners, such as this newspaper’s former columnist Tim Soutphommasane, are prepared to beat the drum publicly to obtain complaints so the HRC can suppress free thought and protect the ­feelings of minority groups.

This newspaper has been the dominant force nationally in reporting Aboriginal disadvantage since the early 1990s. It won a Walkley Award for Rosemary Neill for a piece about violence against Aboriginal women and children by Aboriginal men in the early 1990s and was condemned way back then for racial stereotyping. So the HRC and its friends in the media have learned nothing in the past 25 years about what is really happening in the worst cases in remote Australia.

Triggs and Soutphommasane should read the 2007 Little Children Are Sacred report if they want to see problems for oppressed children. But of course that would not have the desired political ­effect its inquiry into children in offshore detention did.

The Australian should be applauded for its legal stand against the Leak persecution. It has used the behaviour of Soutphom­masane in drumming up complaints through the Fairfax press to nail the commission for its ­blatant bias.

Third, the Leak inquiry shows yet again how right Bolt and ­Attorney-General George Brandis have been about the need for the HRC to defend the most fundamental right of all in any democracy, the right to free expression. How typical that many in the media mocked Brandis’s appointment in 2014 of Tim Wilson as Freedom Commissioner.

On Twitter and in the Left media he was regularly derided as “Freedom Boy”. But he gained ­redemption when as a new ­Member of Parliament for the Victorian seat of Goldstein in his maiden speech he cried as he ­lamented that as a gay man he could not marry the young man he lived with. Instant Left redemption followed. Freedom Boy was OK after all.

The problem is free speech should not be just for people you agree with. And if newspaper ­editors and senior journalists, not just flaky Twitterati, can’t support the freedom of Leak to draw a ­cartoon that accurately portrays the situation some young Aust­ralians find themselves in, I would have to suggest they leave ­journalism and try social work or academia, where repressing the truth and distrusting the wisdom of the majority of Australians are now the norm.

As Leak told Lateline host Emma Alberici on the ABC last Thursday night: “I think 18C is an abomination. Look I can only ­assume that a lot of people ­genuinely believe that freedom of speech means the legal right to hurl abuse. Freedom of speech is what created our civil and free ­society. It is all about ... letting ­people express their views in the marketplace of ideas.”