On day leave from the attic

We can all learn from the Left. No, seriously, for there may well be no greater exemplars of charity than the generous souls who populate the New Establishment. True, it is seldom their own money they give away, but their concern for those who might otherwise be consigned to the locked attics of deranged opinion is genuinely touching.

Take Ms Gillian Triggs, for example, whose recent departure from the Human Rights Commission might reasonably have been assumed to mark the merciful end to her public bleatings. Without the salary, and the aides, the prominence of her office and bureaucratic infrastructure, what is there of the woman? Minus those assets, she is of no use at all, not even up to the task of overseeing the harassment of a humble cartoonist for the offence of expressing truths her patrons prefer never to hear uttered. If not for the progressives’ concern for her welfare, all we might hear from Ms Triggs today would be the sound of a faint and fading voice repeating in regard to much-amended Senate testimonies “I am not a liar” —  not a liar “to a high degree” in any case.

Instead, thanks to that Leftist charity, the Mother Superior of Sophistry was basking in the limelight last night at Victoria University (above), where she presented the latest Michael Kirby Justice Lecture. True, as tertiary institutions go, the former Footscray Tech hasn’t been much of a gig since trading the teaching of plumbing, panel-beating and other productive skills for the promotion of Indigenous climate-change  insights and the social justice shtick, but for Ms Triggs it was the perfect venue, the audience and podium still bearing the spore of previous speakers Julia Gillard and Twitter personality Julian Burnside. Playing to such a crowd requires not much more than the repetition of congenial clichés and emotional assertions, all of which Ms Triggs rounded up with a rag-and-bone picker’s aplomb. She hit her rhetorical apogee with this profundity:

“I might note the paradox that the very people who have been demanding an end to identity politics, to political correctness, all want reform in anti-discrimination laws on race or sex, are the very same people who are now demanding new legislative protection on freedom of religion and freedom of speech.”

Yes, she really said that, neatly turning on its head the entirely legitimate concern that the extension of the presumed “right” to redefine marriage might well – almost certainly will – lead to the further crimping of unfettered free speech, as Augusto Zimmerman explains at some length and detail in his Quadrant Online essay at left.

Being a taxpayer-funded entity, Victoria University has not yet bestirred itself to post either a video or transcript of Ms Triggs’ address, but The Australian has an account that is interesting in itself and made more so by the vitriol of its reader comments.

Follow the link below for that report, and don’t skip the comments.

— roger franklin

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