Racial stoush erupts over QUT computer lab

A woman employed in a top Qld uni’s indigenous unit wants almost $250,000 in damages for racial discrimination.

FILE picture of Cindy Prior, Administration Officer at Queensland University of Technology. (June 2000 image)

A woman employed in a top Queensland university’s indigenous unit is seeking almost $250,000 in damages from jobless students, academics and others in a new legal challenge relying on Australia’s racial discrimination laws.

Cindy Prior accuses three staff at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane — professor­s Anita Lee Hong and Sharon Hayes, and equity director Mary Kelly — and five students in a racial vilification case that is set to reignite tensions over the law’s section 18C.

Tony Abbott, as opposition leader, pledged to repeal the controversial section, which has been slammed by critics as an assault on freedom of speech, but he broke the pledge after becoming prime minister. The section, which makes it unlawful to “offend, insult­, humiliate or intimidate” another­ person or group of people because of their race, colour or ethnic origin, was used in 2011 to find that conservative News Corp commentator Andrew Bolt had breached the law.

Ms Prior, who did not return The Australian’s call yesterday, was an administration officer in the Oodgeroo Unit at QUT’s Gardens­ Point campus, near state parliament. She claims she has suffered­ “offence, embarrassment, humiliation and psychiatric injury­”, as well as ongoing fear for her safety, because of the actions and comments of the students, staffers and university.

The case was triggered after three students, who wandered into the university’s computer lab at the Oodgeroo Unit in May 2013 looking for a place to use a computer, were asked by Ms Prior “whether they were indigenous”.

In legal documents filed in the Federal Circuit Court, Ms Prior says she told the three they were in “an indigenous space for Aborig­inal and Torres Strait students” and that there were other places they could use computers.

Ms Prior, a Noongar woman from the Ballardong nation in Western Australia, said: “The three men told (me) that they were not indig­enous.”

She asked the students to leave the unit and they went away. An hour later a Facebook page, called ‘QUT Stalker Space’, featured a post from one of the students, Alex Wood: “Just got kicked out of the unsigned indigenous computer room. QUT (is) stopping segregation with segregation.”

GRAPHIC: The QUT controversy

There were no signs warning visitors that the Oodgeroo Unit at QUT was off-limits to non-indig­enous students. It is understood that the university has expressly rejected the suggestion it condones racial segregation.

Another student, Jackson Powell, wrote on the Facebook page: “I wonder where the white supremacist computer lab is.”

Another post — “ITT niggers” — was attributed to another stud­ent, Calum Thwaites, who has emphatically denied that he had anything to do with the post.

The students, along with two others, Chris Lee and Kyran Findlater, are now accused of racial vilification in Ms Prior’s 18C legal challenge, which is being run by Brisbane solicitor Susan Mori­arty. Only one of the Facebook posts — “ITT niggers” — is regarde­d as obviously pejorative.

But Dr Hayes, a QUT lecturer, is accused in the legal action­ of having stated at the time that “it seems a bit silly” to kick someone out of an indigenous computer lab for not being indig­enous when there are computers not being used. She had suggested that Ms Prior may have been in breach of QUT policy by asking students who visited the Oodgeroo Unit whether they were indigenous. Ms Prior said she felt “sick, furious and distraught” after the comments of Dr Hayes.

Ms Prior’s action cites Kyran Findlater as having written on the Facebook page: “My Student and Amenity fees are going to furbish rooms in the university where inequality reigns supreme? I believe if we have to pay to support these sorts of places, there should at least be more created for general purpose use, but again, how do these sorts of facilities support interaction­ and community within QUT? All this does is encourage separation and inequality.”

Ms Prior said she went home sick and feeling very stressed on May 29, 2013, as she did not feel safe and was worried about verbal or physical attack.

The university’s equity director, Ms Kelly, who reviewed the matter soon afterwards, removed some of the Facebook posts, and told Ms Prior that three students had taken down the material.

She told her that Dr Hayes had agreed to make no further comment­ about it, while top-level meetings of the vice-chancellor and deputy vice-chancellor resolved­ to put strategies in place, remind students of the code of conduct, and support Ms Prior’s return to work with the help of the university’s rehabilitation and wellness manager.

However, Ms Prior advised that she was complaining to the Australian Human Rights Commission. In a subsequent meeting, Ms Kelly told Ms Prior: “With the small amount of contact I’ve had with the students, it is clear that these students aren’t racist.

“They were just being nasty. There is no white supremacy group at QUT. Check out what racial vilification is before you jump in. They’re not going to come into your office with a baseball bat.”

Seven staff went to an August 1, 2013, meeting with Ms Prior to encourage her to return to work, but her request for a daily security guard patrol was refused. She was then offered a role in a campus on the northside of Brisbane, but rejected it due to the travel and became “unfit for work”.

Her legal challenge claims the Facebook posts were “reasonably likely to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate her” and other Aborigina­l and Torres Strait Islande­r people, and contravened section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.

Her claim for $247,570.52 includes­ lost wages from May 29, 2013, to September 6 last year.

Mr Powell, 22, the student who posted “I wonder where the white supremacist computer lab is”, swore in an affidavit yesterday: “I detest any form of racial discrim­ination. As an Australian and a university student, I was appalled to learn that racial segregation was being practised on the campus of my university.

“Of course, I have no objection to people of the same ethnicity being provided with a place where they can meet and discuss issues of common concern.

“To my mind, however, it is a very different matter when education­al facilities, such as a computer lab provided by the university, are barred to all students except those of a particular race or ethnicity.”

Mr Powell, who studied for a degree in interactive entertainment and is preparing to go to South Korea to seek work, said he did not know any of the other students­ accused by Ms Prior in the legal case.

He said he used a reference to “white supremacists’’ because he was picking on “the most obnoxio­us group of people I could think of, firmly believing that nobody­ could seriously imagine QUT ever providing facilities exclusiv­ely for the use of such persons, but also with the intention that readers of my message would be rightly horrified by the very idea of preferential treatment for white supremacists.

“I now appreciate that what was intended by me as a humorous or lighthearted rhetorical device could potentially be regarded as distasteful by some people. For that, I am very sorry.”

Mr Powell said he did not believe that anyone reading the messages in context could find them “offensive, insulting, humil­iating or intimidating”. “What I objected to was the fact of racial or ethnic discrimination, not the particular ‘race, colour or national or ethnic origin’ of the students who benefit from it,’’ he said.

Mr Powell said he would have reacted the same way if the QUT had set up a “James Joyce Unit’’, providing facilities exclusively for the benefit of Irish students interested in the Irish novelist and poet.

The Human Rights Commission determined in August last year that there was “no reasonable prospect of the matter being settled by conciliation”, resulting in it being filed in the Federal Circuit Court.

A legal reply from Mr Powell’s lawyer, Tony Morris QC, alleges that Ms Prior had breached the Discrimination Act herself by not permitting fee-paying students to use the computers on the basis of their ethnicity. “(Ms) Prior conceived it to be part of the duties of her employment, and took it upon herself, to police and enforce the discriminatory constraint,’’ the legal reply states.

QUT vice-chancellor Peter Coaldrake said yesterday: “QUT takes these sorts of things and all of our obligations very seriously, and very regrettably in this case the matter is in the courts.’’

The Australian has sought comment from Ms Kelly, Professor Lee Hong, Dr Hayes, several­ of the students, Ms Prior and her solicitor.

None returned calls or emails.

But Bolt said yesterday: “The more we divide ourselves by race, the more we will see this kind of battle and these attempts to restric­t free speech.”

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