Multiple offers present an inconvenient truth for Triggs

“I’ve never met him. He’s never phoned me or made any attempt to understand anything. It’s just been a full-on attack,” Gillian Triggs reportedly said.

In a quaint community hall on Saturday, a few dozen of Bill Leak’s closest family and friends gathered to share drinks, camaraderie and a Thai feast prepared by his widow Goong to mark the end of the traditional Buddhist 100 days of mourning. It was a bittersweet occasion.

Call it apt — or call it galling — but when I rejoined civilisation and went online late that afternoon I noticed a fresh outbreak of the not uncommon and always inane Twitter abuse coming my way. It had been sparked by an article in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald by Michael Gordon lauding the outgoing president of the Australian Human Rights Commission, Gillian Triggs.

The article contained the usual attempted deification of Professor Triggs and the now predictable glossing over or censoring of her errors, contradictions, failings and misstatements. But it also contained a sharp and accusatory quote from Triggs about me.

“He keeps swirling the same facts over and over again and they are not true for a start — and that’s all he’s got,” Triggs reportedly said. “I’ve never met him. He’s never phoned me or made any attempt to understand anything. It’s just been a full-on attack.”

This was an extraordinary comment and I was immediately surprised that Gordon had not contacted me. Ethical journalistic practice would ensure that such a damaging claim would be put to the subject for a response. I could have very quickly demonstrated that Triggs’s allegation was untrue.

Here was a journalist happy to facilitate a slight against another journalist for allegedly not giving someone the chance to put their point of view; yet he decided not to give me the chance to put my point of view. It was hypocrisy on steroids; or, at least, peptides. (Naturally enough I have put these concerns to Gordon who said: “I felt I summed up views of her critics accurately and gave her an opportunity to respond.”)

Let’s look at Triggs’s claims. Yes, my reporting has been replete with facts and yes I have repeated them — guilty. Most of those facts simply have been direct quotes from Triggs to various parliamentary inquiries. The facts that she says I keep “swirling” are words out of her mouth that have been contradictory, inconsistent, wrong, untrue or, sometimes, all of the above.

And the president should not be able to get away with saying the facts “are not true” because their truth is what makes them facts. Ipso facto.

So, let’s go to some more facts. The clear imputation of the rest of Triggs’s quote is that I have not given or tried to give her the opportunity to answer criticisms against her. She is right to say we have never met nor spoken on the phone but that has been her choice. And it is not for my want of trying.

Within minutes of reading the Gordon article I was able to dig out numerous requests on my iPhone. “Angela,” I had emailed her media assistant on November 24, 2014, “I wonder if you could please again forward a request to Professor Triggs for an interview.”

On February 26, 2015: “Angela, I am very keen to speak so that I can put some questions to the president as soon as possible …. Happy to chat with the president if possible.”

There have been phone calls to her office over the years, always shunted to her media assistants, and other emails where I passed on detailed queries and sometimes received AHRC statements in response.

On October 20, 2016, my producer at Sky News emailed the AHRC media team: “Chris Kenny is hoping Professor Gillian Triggs can join him on his Viewpoint program this coming Sunday or Monday evening for a discussion of the HRC’s investigation into Bill Leak’s cartoon, the Racial Discrimination Act & recent events surrounding the Nauru detention facility.” The approaches were rejected and my producer passed on a standing interview offer anytime that suited.

In the interim I became so frustrated by Triggs’ refusals (and the lack of forensic questioning when she spoke to so-called progressive journalists) that I sent direct questions to her on Twitter and mentioned from time to time on my television show that she was welcome anytime. “I’d love to have an interview with Gillian Triggs but she won’t turn up,” I said on Sky News Viewpoint on April 24 last year.

Later that same month I tweeted directly to Triggs’ Twitter account my “standing interview requests” for her, Sarah Hanson-Young and Bill Shorten who are two other public figures who have rejected multiple requests (I added a lighthearted wishlist of Bob Dylan, Neil Young and k.d. Lang — perhaps I’ll have more luck with them).

And oldie but goody - showing my frustrations about @GillianTriggs avoidance pic.twitter.com/8s36m0M61I

— Chris Kenny (@chriskkenny) June 18, 2017

The point of these tedious but incontestable facts is that they demonstrate beyond doubt that the clear inference and everyday meaning of what Triggs had to say in the Gordon article was wrong — and she must have known it was wrong. She was willing to attack my integrity by pushing a line she knew was untrue. This fits into a terrible and unfortunate pattern of incorrect and self-serving public statements from the AHRC president.

Naturally, today I sent a detailed list of questions to the AHRC in response, demanding to know whether the requests were never passed on to her or why she would say things that are “demonstrably untrue” and asking her to correct the record. It solicited a response which gives the game away. “Statement from President Professor Gillian Triggs,” was the rather grand heading.

“I stand by my comment that I have never met or spoken to Chris Kenny,” Professor Triggs said. “The Australian Human Rights Commission has responded on my behalf to questions from Mr Kenny, and we have provided comment and interviews to a number of journalists at The Australian and Sky News.”

How disingenuous. Triggs knows she has rejected numerous requests from me so skirts the issue, rather than apologise for the incorrect imputation she promulgated.

She has failed to point out a single factual error in the many thousands of words I have written on her tenure or related issues.

Oh, in case you were wondering, my email repeated the longstanding request for an interview. Her statement was silent on that question. Don’t hold your breath.