QUT race case: the punishment is the process, says Alex Wood

Alex Wood said he had been let down by the commission and his university.

Alex Wood.

Alex Wood, 22, rarely posts on Facebook any more. But he has ­become a voracious reader of other people’s views about section 18C of the federal Racial Discrim­in­ation Act since his Facebook post on May 28, 2013, about segregation, soon after being told to leave a Queensland University of Technology computer lab.

Over a few beers at Brisbane’s riverside Regatta Hotel yesterday, Mr Wood — exonerated by the Federal Circuit Court on Friday in a case which has triggered calls to protect free speech by amending 18C — said he bore no ill will ­towards indigenous QUT staffer, Cindy Prior, who accused him of racial hatred and wanted $250,000.

“I’m not a political activist, I’m just a young bloke who was at uni and made an innocuous observation on a community page,” Mr Wood, in his first year on the job as a civil engineer, told The Australian yesterday.

“But my name was slung around and I was branded a racist, which is the opposite of how I am and how my parents raised me. It has been stressful. There have been some rough times but I’m lucky I got a lot of support.

“People who read into the case could see that what I wrote was ­innocuous. My Mum agreed with what I wrote and was adamant we would not pay $5000 (to Ms Prior and her solicitors) to make the complaint go away, but it lasted 3½ years and permeated every part of my life.

“I think everyone has been a victim, including Cindy Prior. I forgive her. There are no hard feelings from me, personally. She doesn’t know me and I don’t know her. I have nothing to be sorry about, except I’m sorry it came to this. The punishment under ­section 18C is the process. It’s wrong. It needs to be sorted out.”

Mr Wood’s Facebook comment that started the racial hatred case brought by Ms Prior was: “Just got kicked out of the unsigned indigenous computer room. QUT stopping segregation with segregation?”

In his only interview, he said the situation was absurd — he feared his reputation and career hopes would be trashed as the case advanced from the Human Rights Commission to court, until it was finally dismissed on Friday with him being cleared, along with other students, of wrongdoing.

His Facebook post was written shortly after he and two mates had gone to the little-used computer lab at QUT to access computers, not knowing it was indigenous-only. Ms Prior asked if they were indigenous, and asked them to leave when they said they were white.

Mr Wood said he had been let down by the commission and his university — they both failed to tell him for 14 months of the racial hatred case, only alerting him a few days before a conciliation conference with Ms Prior.

His lawyer, Michael Henry, said the principle of freedom of speech made the case particularly important, for Mr Wood and potentially many other Australians.