The Government's disgraceful attacks on Gillian Triggs

[David]

I can't think of any government less entitled to jump on the moral high horse, but by god do they stuff it up when they do.

Michelle Grattan says it all.

https://theconversation.com/brandis-and-dutton-play-some-dirty-pool-in-their-fight-with-gillian-triggs-42948

[watt price tully]

100% correct. The Government is again showing it is a disgrace & nothing it seems is beneath them. Pure bullying & politics.

Ignoring the facts to bully & demonise a tireless defender of Human Rights.

[thebaldfacts]

And in the interest of fairness, the opposing view as brilliantly reported by Chris Kenny highlighting Triggs falsehoods and misrepresentations. Is it any surprise that the Government has lost confidence in her?


http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/gillian-triggs-defenders-need-to-look-at-facts/story-e6frg6zo-1227389482985?sv=f2296c15d9ae2ef47b0373e2bb34484d



If the activists, journalists and politicians who are defending Gillian Triggs really believed their case they would provide a detailed rebuttal of the transgressions over which she is accused.

Instead we are witnessing an Orwellian sham, led by the ABC, where players line up to defend the President of the Australian Human Rights Commission either without any mention of her mistakes or by referencing allegations not even made against her.

Triggs is being defended on political grounds by political opponents of the government without regard for the facts.

This provides a strong clue as to whether or not the AHRC is being well served by her ongoing presidency.

Since November last year, Triggs has been criticised for political partisanship, delaying a crucial human rights inquiry, getting her facts wrong and making inappropriate and erroneous comments.

It is worth going back to my news report published on November 22 last year to clarify both the nature of the issues and the timing.

�The future of Human Rights Commission president Gillian Triggs is under a cloud,� the report began, �after a disastrous appearance before a Senate committee, during which she contradicted her evidence about the political considerations of delaying an inquiry into children in detention. Under questioning, Professor Triggs revealed she had decided an inquiry was necessary early last year but did not act until after the federal election because she feared it would be �highly �politicised� and �very destructive�.

And after denying she raised the matter with Labor before the election, she later admitted discussing it with two former immigration ministers, Chris Bowen and Tony Burke.�

The president�s appearance before the Senate committee that week was the catalyst for all that we have seen since.

Her difficulties cannot be blamed on any political agenda, any partisan attack or any media conspiracy.

At the time Triggs was simply asked straightforward questions and exposed herself with evasive, contradictory and misleading answers.

It was a trainwreck of a performance.

Critically, she failed adequately to explain � despite a range of different attempts � why she didn�t hold an inquiry into children in detention when thousands of asylum-seekers were arriving each month, when children were being shunted into detention, when there were record numbers of children in detention and Labor was in power.

Triggs eventually launched the inquiry only after the Coalition was in government, the boats had been stopped, the number of children in detention had been halved (since then numbers have been cut by more than 90 per cent) and rather than being put into detention, children were being released.

Included in Triggs� rationalisations of this 18-month delay were political considerations � she said it would be �very destructive� to hold the inquiry close to an election (she wrongly said an election was likely any time after March 2013 even though, in January, Julia Gillard had announced a date in September).

With such open reference to political considerations, Triggs was asked if she had discussed the possibility of the inquiry with any Labor ministers.

She said she had not.

Later, under sustained questioning she changed her account and said she had discussed the inquiry on separate occasions with both Bowen when he was immigration minister and Burke when he took over.

Almost as incredible as this evidence was the fact that it was not covered by the ABC.

The national broadcaster which, would never fail to report any criticism of border protection policy from the AHRC, somehow failed to report this extensive, significant and contradictory evidence before a Senate committee.

What is more, even after we revealed the issues in The Australian, all the video of the evidence was available on parliament�s website and in all the months since, despite the growing controversy over Triggs� position, the ABC has never bothered to share these relevant facts with the public.

Remember this is long before Triggs report on children in detention was made public.

We were not to know what her report might or might not say (although, let�s be frank, no-one argues that having children in detention is anything but regrettable) yet already, as stated in my report, it was clear �her position appears untenable.�

Refugee activists should have been horrified � not only should they have been concerned a report into children in detention had been delayed for 18 months, at least in part for political reasons, but the controversy meant that whatever the report found would lack credibility.

Of course, there have been other mistakes by Triggs.

During other hearings she claimed detention centres were like prisons and was forced to retract, and she also claimed detention centre guards were armed before being corrected.

These mistakes were bound to make people suspicious of her other observations.

She has come under fire for recommending $5.9 million in taxpayer-funded compensation payments over just three years, including $350,000 for an Indonesian refugee who beat his Australian spouse to death.

And then, just last week, Triggs suggested the successful people-smuggling boat turnback policy was having a detrimental effect on Australia�s negotiations with Indonesia on such issues as the death penalty � an erroneous and inflammatory comment in the wake of the two recent executions.

Yet the ABC, Labor and Greens MPs and other activists continue to peddle the clear falsehood that Triggs is targeted by the government because of her report, released in February this year.

It is a case, they keep saying, of �shooting the messenger.�

This was a phrase appropriated by none other than Triggs herself in an opinion piece just after her report was released.

�Please do not shoot the messenger,� she wrote.

The line was also used by Ben Saul in an opinion piece for the ABC�s The Drum and by Georgina Dent on her Women�s Agenda website.

The ABC�s Annabel Crabb, along with many others, has written of the �extraordinary attack� on Triggs and former Greens leader Christine Milne has referred to a �witch hunt�.

Attempts to link Triggs� difficulties to the content of her report are clearly wrong, based simply on the chronology.

Those pushing that argument are either being wilfully misleading or ignorant.

Radio National kept up the campaign today, again failing to focus on Triggs� errors and mistakes, and running the line that Triggs� latest comments about the death penalty and Indonesia should not be construed as a reference to the recent executions.

It ran former human rights commissioner, Chris Sidoti, saying, �I think the strategy is basically to have a go at and attack the person who is giving them messages they don�t want to hear,� and another former commissioner Brian Burdekin who described the Triggs affair as �shooting the messenger or playing the man or the woman�.

Radio National�s regular green/left commentator, Paul Bongiorno, told us �if Gillian Triggs is forced out of her job it will undermine completely the credibility of the independent human rights watchdog in this country.�

Bongiorno said this was all about a government which had an attitude that �you�re either for us or against us� and he used comments by former Coalition ministers about a completely separate issue to bolster his argument.

What all these defenders of Triggs have in common is that they ignore the facts.

They simply refuse to share with their audiences the actions and words that caused the government to lose faith in the AHRC president.

If it is possible to explain and justify Triggs� position � the actions and words that caused the government to lose faith in her � then why doesn�t one of her many defenders give it a go?

[Tannin]

More lies in one post than I honestly thought were possible.

[Dave The Man]

All they seem to do in Government is To Pick on each other

[think positive]

[watt price tully]

[thebaldfacts]

Guess it is easier to accuse people of lying and bullying rather than contemplating that maybe it is Trigg's own decitful and partisan actions which have brought all this on her.

[watt price tully]

[Wokko]

Oh give it a rest, this is just like the Gillard supporters playing the gender card when criticism cuts too close to the bone. I've seen one post in here that has made an attempt to discuss the issue and every other response has been insulting nonsense directed at the poster. If he's wrong then say why and how because if this was a debate the TBF had won in a landslide. Post facts, not feels.

[thebaldfacts]

[quote="watt price tully"

Guess it's easier to bully a woman. I get it blame the victim.

[/quote]

Read the facts and leave your political bias aside.

[thebaldfacts]

[Tannin]

Wokko, TBF hasn't posted one single fact so far. He's posted an outrageous and insulting series of lies, distortions, and hysterical nonsense.

Seriously, what would be the point of re-posting the actual facts of the matter? Everybody knows them (except TBF, who either knows them and lies a lot or is very seriously out there in paranoid fantasyland, I'm not sure which), and TBF would only take that as an excuse to drag in still more made up rubbish. It takes time and effort to research things and write them up correctly. It's hard work. For TBF, on the other hand, it is falling of a log easy: in the time it takes me to fact-check and organise one paragraph of truth, TBF can rabbit of a couple of pages worth of made-up rubbish like that above. Or, as he seems to prefer to do, simply copy and paste pre-packaged propaganda lies from the loopy hard-right fringe of the Liberal Party.

Honestly, why should I (or anyone else) waste hours responding to his gibberish? It only encourages him.

[Wokko]

He posted an article in full tha was published in a national newspaper. I'd think that deserves a rebuttal.

[HAL]

Can you give me a more specific reference? The name of the paper and the date, please.