James Paterson (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The first issue is their utter failure to notify the students in the appropriate way. That resulted in some of those students being unable to attend the conciliation and some of those students being unable to arrange for legal representation at the conciliation. That was an extraordinary failure. The second extraordinary failure of the commission in this case was to not immediately dismiss it, as it has the power to do under the Human Rights Act, as a vexatious case or a case without merit. This case should never have gone to court. It should never have taken up 3½ years of the lives of the students in question. The commission had the power to alleviate that, and what they did is extraordinary and disappointing. It was particularly disappointing, after the successful resolution of this case when the Federal Court comprehensively dismissed the complaint, that Ms Triggs went on 7.30 on the ABC and, when asked by the host, Leigh Sales, why she did not dismiss this case, said it was because she thought it had merit. That is an extremely disappointing thing.

While I am talking about the QUT case, I think it is relevant to point out some appalling comments that were made on the Q&A program last night by the member for Griffith, Terri Butler. She smeared the students involved in this case by linking them to comments which have been found by the court to be utterly false. One of the students was alleged to have used the 'n' word in a Facebook post. No evidence was provided to the court that he had done so. He has asserted, since the beginning of the case, that he did not have a Facebook account at the time, that it was a prank and that someone else had done it in his name. The applicant in this case and their lawyers provided no evidence to contest that, and the judge comprehensively dismissed the complaint against this student because there was no evidence for it. So for a Labor member of parliament, on a national television program with hundreds of thousands of viewers, to imply that this student had in fact made this comment, when there is no evidence to find that he did and the court has comprehensively dismissed the complaint against him, is a disgrace.

In my view Calum Thwaites, Alex Wood, Jackson Powell and also Kyran Findlater, the students in the case who we know the most about from public media reporting, have done an exemplary thing for their fellow Australians. They have stood up to extraordinary bullying and inappropriate use of law, and for free speech. If they had not had the courage to do so, we would not know how badly this law is functioning, how direly reform is necessary to fix this law. I think that rather than attacking them and smearing their reputations in the national media, all of us should be grateful for what they have done and should be thanking them for what they have done and for their courage. It was not an easy thing to stand up to this—many students who were accused chose not to, and I understand why they did—but we owe them our grateful thanks.