Gillian Triggs stays put despite calls for resignation
President of the Human Rights Commission Gillian Triggs refused to succumb to "highly personalised" attacks from the government.
PT1M30S 620 349What happened to us? Australia used to be the land of the fair go. A bit daggy, sure, a bit thin on cultural atmosphere and a bloody long way from everywhere except even-daggier New Zealand. But what we lacked in cultivation we made up for in decency. We didn't judge people on wealth or breeding and we were wide open with opportunity. Everyone got a fair go. So we said.
Many people still say it. But look around. Increasingly, Australianness seems to involve the strong beating up on the weak. Rich on poor, male on female, citizens on refugees, priests (and others) on children, white on black, developers on communities, private schools on public, big mining on fragile ecosystems.
Illustration: Dionne Gain
Why are we OK with this? How did the fair go slip so seamlessly into tooth and claw? Or was it always thus?
We regard Australia as incomparably more benign, human rights-wise than, say, China. Ai Weiwei's imprisonment for dissidence strikes us as one thing, and the Australian government's proposal to jail doctors who speak out about our loathsome, people-rotting camps as quite another. But how smug do we deserve to be, actually?
Ai's new show at the NGV includes Letgo, a portrait-room of Australian human-rights activists. One of them, smiling gently from the ceiling like some Sistine angel, is of Professor Gillian Triggs, Human Rights Commissioner and 2015 Daily Life Woman of the Year.
Triggs' recent speech to the Australian Institute for International Affairs described Australia's current bid to join the 47-member UN Human Rights Council. More than 100 countries critiqued Australia's recent human rights record. Most, while recognising Australia's honourable history in this regard, raised serious concerns about our current trajectory: our intractable gender pay gap, our refusal to oppose torture, our incarceration of young Aborigines (27 times the national average), our mandatory detention of refugees (still including more than 200 children), our vile Border Force Act and, of course, our appalling rates of violence against women.
Familiar issues all, but we don't often consider them together, to wonder whether we're still the kind of country we're proud of.
This year, 79 women – more than one a week – have died violently, mostly killed by men they knew well. One in three women in Australia has experienced violence from men. One in five has been stalked.
Yes, the feds have thrown money at domestic violence but in Victoria, it seems, they've stopped even pretending to see it as a moral issue. A new report by PwC for Vic Health – entitled "A high price to pay: The economic case for preventing violence against women" – spends its entire 110 pages arguing that "violence against women costs us $21.7 billion a year". As though that's why we should care.
Imagine if 79 men had died from shark attacks. As Annabel Crabb memorably quipped, "if a man got killed by a shark every week we'd probably arrange to have the ocean drained." Yet until recently, when Destroy the Joint started the count, the figures on dead women weren't even collected. Hardly a fair go.
And less fair still if you're one of Australia's original inhabitants. Indigenous women are 35 times more likely to be violently attacked than non-indigenous women. Incarceration is far higher, life expectancy far lower and land ownership far less secure.
Sure, all farmers are threatened by coal mines. But most will still own their land, however ravaged. Not so if you're Indigenous. The Wangan and Jagalingou people, on whose traditional lands federal Environment Minister Greg Hunt recently re-endorsed Adani's giant Carmichael coal mine, repeatedly refused permission. No one listened. No one cared. Now the Queensland government, in retaliation even for that ineffectual opposition, has moved to extinguish native title altogether over the land in question. Is this a fair go?
That's Big Mining. No less disgraceful is Big Church's response to child abuse. Abuse of a child by a religious leader is an especially profound betrayal of trust, but among all the cruel and unchristian responses I've heard from church hierarchies only one carries any nobility. That was the extraordinarily brave and candid response from Anglican Bishop Greg Thompson of Newcastle who, exiling himself from the comfort of the corporate church, named his own episcopal abuser and denounced this crime of the strong against the weak as the abuse of power it is.
The rest simply close ranks and victim-blame in a way that would make God herself blush with shame. A fair go? Really?
As to refugees, Gillian Triggs, receiving her award, called 2015 her "most difficult" year yet. Why? Because of her Forgotten Children report. The work itself, says Triggs, was "impregnable in terms of the evidence and the legal position". So naturally her employer, the Abbott government, launched a fury of personal attacks designed to discredit her judgment, motivation, competence and veracity.
Of course these attacks were political (in the sense of: "empty of principle or content, wholly focused on the battle for public affections"). It was a politically motivated attempt to make Triggs seem politically motivated – or, more simply, to shoot the messenger.
But Triggs is unrepentant. Patiently she explains why our stance – our refusal to enshrine the UN anti-torture convention in our laws, our rejection of the global non-refoulement principle, our adherence to mandatory indefinite detention – is not just immoral but to a significant extent illegal. Fair go? Seriously? In what world?
The common ground of all these battles is that single, shared principle, Australia's founding ideal and primary point of difference; the fair go. Be it brief, humble and colloquial, the fair go is both our true constitution and our closest approach to a bill of rights.
If we took the fair go seriously, none of these battles – from feminism to environmentalism to the asylum seeker debacle – would exist. When, conversely, we abandon this principle, life rapidly congeals into the layers of self-reinforcing privilege Australia was meant to end: the class system.
Wakey wakey, Australia. World stage here. Global citizens, cue best selves. Fair go, bro.
Twitter: @emfarrelly
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