Have you heard of the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions? No, me neitheruntil recently. Last week the Geneva-based organisation officially put Australia on notice. Ifthe federal government does not change the process of making statutory appointments to the Australian Human Rights Commission, the institution could lose its accreditation as an “A-status’’ body.
This is most worrying given GANHRI is a United Nations-affiliated body, and its officials are very important. You do not want to mess with these people. To incur the wrath of this organisation is a frightful experience, much like receiving an angry letter from the Seaweed Appreciation Society or having the Llama Association of Australasia besiege your city.
So what should we do to prove to GANHRI we deserve our A-status accreditation? I have a few ideas. We should abolish our secular democracy in favour of a barbaric and misogynist theocracy. Or we could round up homosexuals and imprison them indefinitely. There is also the option of us invading a neighbouring country.
It sounds counterproductive but carrying out such activities will bolster our social justice credentials immensely, because these policies reflect those of Afghanistan, Qatar, and Russia respectively. According to GANRHI’s website, each of those countries has a human rights commission with A-status certification. So too does Colombia, El Salvador, Mexico, Iraq, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, just to name a few other luminaries.
Sadly, I am not joking. If the government does not forego its prerogative to appoint statutory officers to the AHRC in the absence of a selection process, the agency will be relegated to B-status alongside Libya and Venezuela. You could be forgiven for thinking GANHRI is an anacronym for ‘Global Alliance of Numpties, Halfwits, and Risible Imbeciles’.
And surprise, surprise: the foreshadowed downgrading only became known just as the federal election was announced. As this newspaper reported, last week the president of the AHRC, emeritus professor Rosalind Croucher, even gave shadow attorney-general Mark Dreyfus a heads-up before GANRHI’s report was made public.
Not surprisingly, Assistant Minister to the Attorney-General Amanda Stoker has reacted angrily, accusing Croucher of “a blatant attempt to influence how Australians vote,” a claim the AHRC rejected. “In order to ensure a fair and apolitical approach on the eve of a federal election campaign, the commission made the decision to inform both the Attorney-General and the shadow attorney-general,” a spokesperson said.
In its assessment, GANHRI decreed the AHRC needed additional public moneys, adding it encourages the organisation “to advocate for an appropriate level of funding to ensure the sustainability of its funding base in carrying out its mandate”. Conveniently it omitted to note the AHRC’s shortfall was due to administrative incompetence requiring a federal government bailout to keep the agency afloat.
Despite this oversight occurring on Croucher’s watch, she refuses to step down. She was rightfully castigated for “financial mismanagement” at a Senate committee hearing last week and could offer little in her defence. But here’s another amazing coincidence: she provided GANHRI’s report to the Opposition the day before her appearance.
Her organisation has reacted with faux dismay to GANHRI’s findings, but privately the AHRC and its acolytes are delighted. The potential loss of the agency’s accreditation has given them a licence to publicly disparage former appointee and now Liberal MP Tim Wilson, and Lorraine Finlay, the current Human Rights Commissioner and a former member of the Western Australian Liberal Women’s council.
But even The Guardian grudgingly conceded last year that Finlay – a former academic, prosecutor, and human rights scholar – is well-qualified to serve in her current position.
Rather than acknowledge this, however, GANHRI resorted to false insinuations by recommending the government “select [AHRC] members to serve in their own individual capacity rather than on behalf of the organization they represent”. This is a crude and deliberate mischaracterisation.
I do not recall GANHRI making similar claims when the Gillard Government appointed the late former federal Labor minister Susan Ryan to the AHRC as Age Discrimination Commissioner in 2011. In 2013, when he was Attorney-General, Dreyfus, who criticised the selection of Finlay, appointed former Labor staffer Tim Soutphommasane as Race Discrimination Commissioner when the latter was in his early thirties.
The only ‘problem’ with Finlay’s suitability is she agitates for individual rights that are anathema to the AHRC and GANHRI mindset, particularly her view that the civil prosecution provisions of the Racial Discrimination Act unduly impinge free speech. Last week she spoke out against the McGowan Government’s plan to extend Western Australia’s COVID emergency powers.
“While it may be that restrictions are justified, they don’t have the same scrutiny or accountability attached to them and when that goes on for a number of years, the state of emergency effectively becomes the normal state of affairs and that’s really concerning,” she said. No wonder the statist control freaks despise her.
If the AHRC’s status is to be downgraded, it should be because of the agency’s anti- conservative partisanship, which was at its most blatant during Gillian Triggs’s tenure as president. Appointed in 2012 by the Gillard Government, she delayed an inquiry into children in immigration detention until the Coalition assumed power.
Asked later by a Senate committee whether she had spoken to the Labor immigration minister in 2012 about the possibility of holding an inquiry, Triggs equivocated. “I certainly did not discuss that as far as I recall with the minister,” she said. Pressed about whether she had discussed this subject with other Labor ministers, she said “I don’t recall”. It was only after further questioning that her memory improved. “I have discussed the possibility of an inquiry with minister Chris Bowen and with minister (Tony) Burke,” she said.
In an interview in 2016 with The Saturday Paper, she haughtily deplored her treatment by the committee. “I knew I could have responded and destroyed them,” she boasted. “I could have said, You’ve asked me a question that demonstrated you have not read our statute.
How dare you question what I do?”. She later denied making those comments. Only when the newspaper produced the recorded interview did she admit “upon further reflection” that the article was accurate.
In response the UN demanded recriminations against those who had exposed Triggs’s bias and incompetence. “I have been at several occasions alerted to government-led or supported harassment of AHRC, taking the form of verbal attacks by politicians and media outlets,” said UN Special Rapporteur Michel Forst when visiting here in 2016.
Denouncing those who had “publicly questioned” Triggs’s “integrity, impartiality and judgement,” he resorted to implied threats. “I have not been informed of any investigations undertaken against the perpetrators of those attacks,” he said. There is a stark example of your typical human rights idealogue and their attitude to a free press. How government minders resisted the temptation to grab this obnoxious panjandrum by the ear and put him on the next plane out I will never know.
Triggs survived through pure opportunism. Making full use of anti-conservative sentiment and with Labor’s enthusiastic support, she portrayed herself as a human rights martyr who opposed the cruelty of the Coalition. She revelled in being untouchable and was unquestionably political. One of her last acts as president was addressing as guest of honour the Bob Brown Foundation, an activist group named after the former Greens leader. The AHRC’s standing remains damaged to this day.
Worryingly, Croucher also shows signs of this partisanship, although not yet to the same degree as Triggs. But she insults our intelligence by insisting that disclosing GANHRI’s report to the Opposition was a “fair and apolitical” act, especially given the timing.
That claim is much like Croucher’s ability to manage a budget. It doesn’t add up.
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