Race Commissioner has blatantly prejudged Bill Leak over cartoon

The Race Discrimination ­Commissioner has just made it ­extremely dangerous for his ­organisation to discharge all of its statutory duties.

Tim Soutphommasane has ­encouraged people to lodge complaints with the commission about Bill Leak’s cartoon last week depicting an Aboriginal ­policeman returning a delinquent Aboriginal youth to his equally delinquent Aboriginal father.

The problem is that the commissioner has prejudged those complaints: Leak, according to Soutphommasane’s public statements, is guilty and people should feel free to complain.

Those complaints will all go to Soutphommasane’s organisation, where every official knows that one of those at the top has already made up his mind.

That means any attempt by the commission to deal with complaints about Leak’s cartoon is now vulnerable to challenge for a perception of bias.

Leak, like everyone else in this country, has a right to procedural fairness. Decision-makers who knowingly infringe that right might also be vulnerable to accus­ations of malice.

In free societies, the right to a fair hearing before an arm of the state is fundamental — a fact that has long been recognised in Australian administrative law.

Soutphommasane’s prejudgment of Leak’s cartoons was not a mere slip-up. It was blatant, which can be seen from a report on the affair that was published last week by Fairfax Media.

He was quoted as saying: “Our society shouldn’t endorse racial stereotyping of Aboriginal ­Australians or any other racial or ethnic group.”

He said “a significant number” of people would agree the cartoon was a racial stereotype of Aborig­inal Australians and he urged anyone who was offended by it to lodge a complaint under the ­Racial Discrimination Act.

In case anyone missed that ­article, Soutphommasane took to Twitter to ensure that his 15,091 followers had a link to the story outlining his views.

The tweet containing that link said this: “Our society shouldn’t endorse racial stereotyping of ­Aboriginal Australians — or, for that matter, any other group”.

Thanks to Soutphommasane’s efforts in drumming up complaints, it is now a fair bet that Leak will be asked to turn up at a closed-door “mediation” with someone who has been influenced by Soutphommasane.

The fact that his boss, Gillian Triggs, has not intervened to discipline him or limit the impact of his prejudgment of the cartoons will be viewed by many as an ­implicit endorsement of what he had to say. That will not be lost on all those whose careers at the commission can be influenced by Triggs and Soutphommasane.

Her inaction, coupled with his prejudgment, means that the ­commission has probably left it too late to remove the perception that it is incapable of fairly dealing with any complaint about the ­cartoon.

Here’s what needs to happen. Thanks to Soutphommasane, there will be complaints to the commission about the cartoon. Somebody will need to deal with them. In another case where the commission has been accused of breaching human rights, it brought in an independent silk to avoid the obvious conflict of interest. Thanks to the Race Discrim­in­ation Commissioner, it needs to do the same thing now.

That will be a ridiculously ­expensive waste of taxpayers’ money but the alternative is for the commission to blunder on, hoping that Leak will allow his rights, as well as his reputation, to be traduced.

If the Human Rights Commission has a future, it needs to start conducting itself with the self-discipline and professionalism expected of other statutory officers.