Gillian Triggs, Magnificent Failure

I’d like to extend hearty congratulations to Gillian Triggs, mercifully and soon to be the former president of the Australian Human Rights Commission, for winning the Voltaire award from Liberty Victoria for defending freedom of speech.

It might seem incredibly odd that such an award be given to someone who has expressed genuine regret — not the ironic kind — that laws such as Section 18C can only be deployed to police public speech, not private dinner-table conversations. The woman to be honoured also presided over the AHRC during the ill-fated Queensland University of Technology case, which saw blameless students locked in a three-year legal battle against a complainant who took issue with their criticism of a computer lab segregated by race, further demanding substantial cash payouts to assuage her hurt feelings. Such is Ms Triggs’ managerial competence that the victims of that complaint were not notified for months that their ludicrously alleged racism had become the…