Triggs misled Senate with blast over journalist’s use of quotes

Gillian Triggs’s attempts to blame journalists for manufacturing quotes have been disproved.

 

Human Rights Commission president Gillian Triggs has ­admitted she misled parliament after her attempts to blame journalists for manufacturing quotes and citing her out of context were yesterday disproved by an audio recording.

The error has plunged the human rights ­advocate into a fresh controversy, leaving her ­facing accusations her testimony was an ­“apparent ­deception”.

Professor Triggs, appearing ­before the Senate’s legal and constitutional affairs committee on Tuesday, was queried about comments to The Saturday Paper’s ­Ramona Koval in which she fumed at “seriously ill-informed and uneducated” politicians questioning her work.

The lawyer told the Senate some quotes from the transcript were “inaccurate” and others had been “taken out of context”. She denied suggesting she could have “destroyed” the committee by challenging its authority, insisting the quote was “put in by a sub-­editor”.

After learning the newspaper had an audio recording of the ­interview, Professor Triggs yesterday offered to “clarify” her evidence to the committee. “Upon further reflection I ­accept that the article was an ­accurate excerpt from a longer ­interview,” Professor Triggs told The Australian.

“I had no intention of questioning The Saturday Paper’s journalistic integrity. I have today written to the committee to clarify my statement.

“I ­answered questions regarding the article in good faith and based on my best recollection.”

The Saturday Paper’s editor, Erik Jensen, said Professor Triggs had “misrepresented and badly impugned” the integrity of Koval’s journalism. “I’ve listened to a tape of the ­interview this morning. Nowhere does the edited transcript lose context or meaning,” he said. “Ramona Koval is one of this country’s finest interviewers. The piece she did on Professor Triggs brought new insights to Professor Triggs’ relationship with the ­government, and a level of candour Professor Triggs now ­appears to regret.”

Queensland Coalition senator Ian Macdonald, who chairs the committee, said Professor Triggs’ conflicted evidence exposed an “apparent deception” of the ­parliament.

“I would take very, very seriously any suggestion that a senior statutory official would deliberately mislead the Senate in her comments on anything, but on that particular transcript,” Senator Macdonald said.

“All other issues aside, it is disturbing that senior officers would resort to that sort of misinformation to a Senate committee.”

The Abbott government suspended contact with Professor Triggs following her inconsistent evidence to the committee about the genesis of her inquiry into the immigration detention system, The Forgotten Children.

Professor Triggs initially claimed not to have discussed the idea with the Rudd-Gillard ­government in 2013, then recalled discussions with two Labor ministers, then denied any such talks took place.

Professor Triggs gave various reasons for delaying the inquiry until after the 2013 election, which swept Labor out of office, and then provided an entirely different explanation in the report itself.

In June last year, one month after the executions of Bali Nine convicts Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, Professor Triggs suggested Indonesia had rejected Australia’s pleas regarding the death penalty because it was upset by boat turnbacks. She subsequently denied linking turnbacks to the Bali Nine case, insisting she was talking about executions in general. In her interview with Koval, Professor Triggs said: “All they (senators) know is the world of Canberra and politics and they’ve lost any sense of a rule of law, and curiously enough for Canberra they don’t even understand what democracy is.

“I knew I could have responded and destroyed them — 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?’ ”