Peter Dutton: ‘Political’ Gillian Triggs should go

Immigration Minister Peter Dutton has urged Gillian Triggs to consider resigning as Human Rights Commission president.

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Immigration Minister Peter Dutton has urged Gillian Triggs to consider resigning, arguing she has debased her position as Human Rights Commission president by pursuing a political agenda.

Mr Dutton on Friday reignited the political tensions with the head of the human rights watchdog, saying she was a “complete disgrace” for linking boat turn-backs to the Indonesian executions of the Bali Nine duo.

He continued the attack yesterday after being forced to ­defend the government’s proposal to strip citizenship from foreign fighters after Professor Triggs claimed it was an example of executive overreach.

“When you reduce the position to basically that of a political advocate, I think it is very difficult to continue on,” he told the Ten Network’s Bolt Report program.

Asked whether Professor Triggs should go, Mr Dutton said: “These are issues for Professor Triggs to contemplate.”

Professor Triggs has since ­denied her comments to a Committee for Economic Development of Australia forum last week were intended as a reference to the executions of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran.

“Boats have got to stop,” Professor Triggs told the forum. “But have we thought about what the consequences are of pushing ­people back to our neighbour ­Indonesia? Is it any wonder that Indonesia will not engage with us on other issues that we care about, like the death penalty?”

A spokeswoman has clarified that Professor Triggs was “referring to efforts within the region to achieve a moratorium on the death penalty”.

In further comments to the Human Rights Law Centre and Justice Connect annual dinner in Melbourne on Friday night, Professor Triggs launched a stinging rebuke of the laws passed by parliament over the past decade and said they had undermined a healthy, robust democracy.

She took aim at the proposals allowing the minister to strip citizenship, warning it could “violate Australia’s international obligation not to render a person stateless” and said the decision could “be at the discretion of a minister, without recourse to ­judicial processes”.

“This proposal strikes at the heart of Australia as a largely ­migrant nation,” she said.

But Mr Dutton said the proposal would not render anybody stateless. He also reaffirmed his preference for the parliament to give him the ability to strip citizenship, subject to judicial review, rather than to delegate the ­responsibility to a court. He said about 110 Australians were fighting in Iraq and Syria while ASIO had 400 high-priority terrorism-related investigations under way.

Government whip Andrew ­Nikolic also took aim at Professor Triggs’s comments questioning the “unseemly haste’’ in which last year’s Foreign Fighters Act was passed and its curbs on freedom of movement.

Mr Nikolic, a former senior army officer and a former senior public servant, is a member of parliament’s powerful joint committee on intelligence and security. “Professor Triggs is out of touch with the vast majority of Australians,” he said.

Additional Reporting: Stefanie Balogh