ABC self-censorship over Gillian Triggs blatant

WHAT we are seeing from the ABC on the Gillian Triggs affair amounts to one of the most blatant and wilful examples of media self-censorship in living memory.

Over the past week, across the vast array of platforms and programs available to the public broadcaster, its journalists and program hosts have given time over to defending Triggs: But from what? Their audiences are never told.

Indeed the genesis of Triggs’ troubles, her disastrous performance before a Senate estimates committee last November, remains, remarkably, unreported at the ABC.

The broadcaster normally gives prominence to asylum-seeker issues and the posturing of human rights activists yet the appearance by the Australian Human Rights Commission president to discuss her inquiry was strangely ignored.

Not a report was filed about the contradictions, misstatements, errors and changing explanations unfurled by the president before that committee.

And despite this triggering the government’s loss of faith in her, the ABC has never done its audiences the service of going back to that performance to explain what is going on.

Instead it reports defences of Triggs on the grounds that she is a woman being “bullied” by the government or because the government is “blaming the messenger”.

Yet the ABC — or at least some of its journalists and hosts — must know this is wrong. If they have informed themselves sufficiently to make such a defence they must also know that Triggs is no messenger; that nobody needed her inquiry to explain that children shouldn’t be in detention.

Now the ABC has even used its Fact Checking Unit to check one of the few points made by Triggs that no one challenges and that adds nothing to the debate.

“Correct” finds the ABC after examining Triggs’s statement that under the Coalition children, on average, have spent longer in detention.

It is an unavoidable calculation — when no more children are going into detention and 90 per cent have been removed, the average period will automatically rise.

Add to that the practical consideration that the children who remain will be the difficult cases and you are looking at a statement of the obvious.

The ABC could have decided to fact check the 90 per cent claim. But didn’t.

The ABC could have fact checked Triggs’ erroneous claim that armed guards patrol detention centres. But didn’t.

The ABC could have fact checked her likening of detention centres to prisons but, not to worry, she retracted that herself.

ABC viewers and audiences will still be unaware that, according to her own evidence, Triggs decided within weeks of taking over at AHRC in July 2012 that the issue of children in detention was urgent and an inquiry was warranted.

Neither will they know that despite those apparently heartfelt concerns Triggs did not call an inquiry in 2012 and continued to discuss an inquiry in 2013 but failed to call one.

During this period thousands of asylum-seekers arrived and were put into detention. Over this period, while Triggs held off on holding an inquiry, the number of children in detention at one time reached a record of nearly 2000.

Still she didn’t launch the inquiry.

A year ticked over. The government changed. A year and half ticked over. The boats stopped. Detentions centres started to empty. The number of children in detention halved as it fell into a steep decline.

Then she called an inquiry.

ABC audiences have not heard these facts and they have not heard AM, PM, 7.30 or Q & A ask why Triggs failed to act on the pressing children in detention issue for 18 months.

Neither have they heard Triggs deny discussing this issue with Labor ministers, or when pressed on that issue, refuse to answer the question. And so they have not heard how, when pressed further, she admitted to discussing it with two Labor ministers.

ABC viewers have not seen the senate estimates video of Triggs explaining her decision to delay the inquiry around February 2013 by saying she feared a snap election would be called — when she must have forgotten that the September election date had already been announced in January.

ABC viewers know that Triggs claimed in senate estimates last week that the Secretary of the Attorney-General’s Department, Chris Moraitis, asked her to resign last month.

What they probably didn’t hear was that Moraitis emphatically denies this, and says he never used the words resignation or resign.

Neither have ABC audiences heard that Triggs failed to reveal the origins of that meeting.

Only when Moratis gave evidence did we hear that Triggs had called him and asked him to ascertain and report back on the Attorney-General’s views of her situation. Triggs later confirmed this call.

As the ABC — and it must be said, most of the Canberra press gallery — would have it, Triggs has somehow come under fire from the government because she told them they had children in detention.

This is a government that has not put children into detention but has released them. A government that has released 9 of every 10 children Labor bequeathed it. And a government committed to releasing the rest as soon as possible.

The sad fact, unexplored by the ABC or most gallery journalists, is that while the children in detention situation was a crisis running out of control, the AHRC knew about it and waited — for more than a year.

Why did Triggs let kids stew in detention for 18 months before starting her inquiry? That is a question to which she has provided more than half a dozen conflicting answers; and none of them make any sense.