Gillian Triggs must be removed by the Coalition Government

Australian Human Rights Commission President Gillian Triggs at this week’s Senate estimates hearings.

That Gillian Triggs can remain in her job is one of the great mysteries of Australian politics. The revelations about her misleading evidence to a parliamentary inquiry this week are extraordinary, not so much because she has been caught out and forced to correct herself, but because this has become a regular occurrence.

The Australian Human Rights Commission President’s appearances over the past three years before parliamentary committees and her own inquires have been a series of train wrecks and car crashes that would have ended the career of most politicians, bureaucrats or journalists.

Simply put, she has repeatedly been caught out making false statements.

That she has been granted unofficial immunity for her sins by the ABC, Fairfax, most journalists, the Labor Party, the Greens and even many moderate Liberal MPs says a great deal about the values of the political class. Because Triggs has styled herself as the leading compassionista, someone fighting for the rights of asylum-seekers and refugees, the normal rules have not been applied to her.

When she has erred, the national broadcaster has censored the stories. When this newspaper has pointed out her mistakes, the national broadcaster and other media have refused to report these relevant facts and have neglected to even ask her questions about her misstatements and corrections.

Instead she has been given endless platforms from which to attack the government and its border protection policies and avoid any scrutiny over her own claims and actions.

Triggs and her media and political supporters say she has been punished for challenging the Coalition’s offshore processing policies. She has claimed and been given the prized and impenetrable cloak of victimhood.

Yet let us be clear. The starting point for criticism of Triggs is not that she sought to conduct a report on the welfare of children in detention. Her gravest error is that having decided it was a matter requiring urgent attention when she took over at the AHRC in July 2012, she delayed holding that inquiry for 18 months while Labor was in power and close to 2000 children were in detention at any one time.

While thousands of kids were churned through detention, Triggs waited and held off her planned inquiry. And things started falling apart for her when she tried to explain all this.

In late 2014 she was quizzed about it in a disastrous parliamentary committee performance that most media never covered.

The AHRC president first denied discussing an inquiry into children in detention with government ministers when Labor was in power, then faltered and said the information was confidential, ­before eventually admitting she had discussed the idea with not one, but two Labor immigration ministers.

She also revealed that after the change of government she did not immediately discuss the proposal with the new government, but sent a letter informing them of her decision four months later.

Triggs was also caught out over her excuse for delaying the inquiry under Labor. The reason she proffered was that an election “was imminent” from about March 2013 and it was going to be called “very soon”, and no one knew the exact date. Yet the then prime minister, Julia ­Gillard, had taken the unusual step in January that year of announcing a September election date.

Time and again, Triggs’ evidence just does not stack up.

To compound her woes, when Triggs eventually established her inquiry in 2014 she claimed in a hearing there were armed guards at detention centres, which she likened to prisons, before being challenged and having to retract her claims.

There is a pattern in all of this. Triggs attacks the Coalition government (usually over border protection issues), makes erroneous statements to parliamentary inquiries, admits her errors and corrects the record, is given a leave pass by opposition politicians and the media, claims to be unfairly targeted when government MPs or journalists point out her mistakes, and then repeats the process.

In the meantime her human rights commission is busy trying to censor a cartoonist and harass students who dared to mock the race-based allocation of university computers.

The Triggs saga must be brought to an end. The government must dismiss her. Sure, she will claim it is unfair and that she is a victim but she claims all that anyway. Triggs might challenge her dismissal in court. So be it.

She could even take her complaint to the AHRC. It doesn’t matter. Taxpayers should not continue to fund her indulgences.