Recently, amid MYEFO and a host of other outrages, Attorney-General George Brandis announced the appointment of Tim Wilson as a Human Rights Commissioner:
During the election campaign, I promised to create at least one “Freedom Commissioner” at the Australian Human Rights Commission. Next year, I intend to bring forward reforms to the Commission. In the meantime, I have asked Mr Wilson to focus on the protection of the traditional liberal democratic and common law rights, including, in particular, the rights recognised by Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Mr Wilson’s extensive background as a public policy intellectual, his skill as an advocate and his courage as a human rights champion make him superbly equipped to be Australia’s new Human Rights Commissioner.
Article 19 relates to the notorious ‘freedom of expression’:
1. Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference.
2. Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.
3. The exercise of the rights provided for in paragraph 2 of this article carries with it special duties and responsibilities. It may therefore be subject to certain restrictions, but these shall only be such as are provided by law and are necessary:
(a) For respect of the rights or reputations of others;
(b) For the protection of national security or of public order (ordre public), or of public health or morals.
The Left has gone into meltdown over the announcement. Tim Wilson was, until very recently, a member of the Liberal Party and a member of the Institute of Public Affairs, a libertarian think tank. As far as cookie-cutter villains go in Australian political commentary, few groups attract quite as much loathing as the IPA.
Responses to Wilson’s appointment on social media have ranged from mining his Twitter account for unsavoury opinions, to parody accounts to full-blown tantrums.
And, now that a few days have passed, we have begun to see various opinion pieces written by the usual crowd of lefties about how terrible this appointment is.
The problem with this reaction is that it fails to engage with the meat of the issue about political appointments, and furthers a toxic conversation about what ideology is and how it works.
Back at the last Senate Estimates, Liberal Party Senator Sean Edwards began an unusual line of inquiry into the appointment of Dr Tim Soutphommasane as the Race Discrimination Commissioner:
Senator Edwards: My questions this morning relate to the recent appointment of the Race Discrimination Commissioner, Dr Soutphommasane, who joins us here today. Secretary or president, in relation to that recent appointment, can you tell me how long that position was advertised for before you made the appointment?
Prof. Triggs: I do not think I can give you a very precise answer to that. I think it was something like six weeks. I would have to take that on notice to be precise.
Senator Edwards asked a number of questions about the appointment process, the salary, and Dr Soutphommasane’s political persuasion. It was felt that Dr Soutphommasane had been successful because he’d been a prominent member of the ALP. He had worked for both Bob Carr and Kevin Rudd, and had co-edited a book on ALP policy direction. Although Dr Soutphommasane indicated that he resigned from the ALP after being announced as the new Commissioner, the Coalition still thought that Dr Soutphommasane’s comments in previous roles demonstrated that he had an unacceptable bias:
Senator Edwards: I want to take you to comments that you made that were reported in the Age on Monday 30 July 2012. ‘Any Abbott premiership will reflect the man: the muscular Christianity, Anglo-centralism, combative instincts, conservative ideology.’ Is that quoting you directly?
Dr Soutphommasane: I believe it is from July 2012.
Senator Edwards: Isn’t a comment such as that in this role, given the president’s earlier comments about impartiality and non-partisan position, quite the opposite?
Dr Soutphommasane: Those comments would have been made by me in my capacity as a political philosopher employed by Monash University in 2012.
This was not a new concern of the Coalition. Back in May this year, the Liberal Party asked some heated questions about the appointment of Russell Skelton to head up the ABC’s Fact Check:
Senator Abetz: Can we believe that Mr Skelton will be impartial when checking the public statements of politicians when just last July he tweeted ‘Abbott’s extremism on display’? Are we to assume this is a display of impartiality by Mr Skelton?
Senator Abetz went on a lengthy exploration of Mr Skelton’s unsavoury tweets, resulting in some scoffing and mocking from the Left.
In both cases, the response was that comments from the past did not show an unacceptable bias. Just because they held particular views, there was no reason to believe that the candidates couldn’t perform their new roles professionally and apolitically. Naturally, the Coalition was not satisfied with this answer.
It is therefore interesting to note that when somebody with a libertarian bias is given the role, the Left goes full-Abetz. On the one hand, we are expected to believe that examples of political bias will not affect Dr Soutphommasane’s or Mr Skelton’s ability to perform their roles. On the other, we are expected to believe that examples of political bias will affect Tim Wilson’s ability to perform his.
Australians do not engage with the discussion of bias well. Instead of simply admitting that everybody is ideologically influenced and being open about bias, we get very upset when people mention it. Ideology is something bad and only people who disagree with me are affected by it.
But it’s this inability to engage with the ideology question that makes the conversation about Tim Wilson so very stupid.
We should be annoyed that there was not a merit-based selection. It is difficult to understand why Tim Wilson was appointed to the position when we have two scholars in Australia — Professor Sarah Joseph and Ms Melissa Castan — who literally wrote the book on the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, article 19 of which Wilson is supposed to defend.
[Former Attorney-General, Nicola] Roxon, did extend me the courtesy of consulting me, as the shadow Attorney-General, in relation to a couple of very important appointments, specifically, the appointments of High Court judges, where the views of the opposition were elicited by her. In fact, the appointments to the High Court made under her attorney-generalship were in each case the names of persons who appeared on the list that I had given her confidentially as people the then opposition considered of sufficient eminence to be appointed to the High Court. The reason I make that point, Senator Edwards, is that there was on occasions, by the previous government, the practice of consulting me on very important appointments. But that practice was not observed at all by [former Attorney-General] Mr Dreyfus and it certainly was not observed in relation to the appointment, on the eve of the 2013 election, of a longstanding senior member of the Australian Labor Party to what the President has told us must absolutely be a nonpartisan and impartial office.
But — perhaps most importantly — we should be annoyed that the Attorney-General has shown such poor judgement. The Australian Human Rights Commission is an ideological organisation established specifically to meet a particular policy goal. Namely, we want to ensure that minorities have the best possible chance to have their voices included in public discussion. We want to make sure that the mainstream — either willfully or (far more commonly) out of ignorance and disinterest — don’t trample on people who can’t fight back on equal terms.
Appointing Tim Wilson (sans merit-based selection process, sans bipartisan support) shows that Brandis doesn’t understand the ideological ground for the Human Rights Commission. This isn’t about protecting the ‘rights’ of the Bolts, tobacco companies, and unions; this is about protecting the people who don’t have many other options.
If the Left wants to protect the Human Rights Commission — and I think it should — then it needs to get over its squeamishness about engaging with ideology.
Mark Fletcher is a Canberra-based blogger and policy wonk who writes about conservatism, atheism, and popular culture. He blogs at OnlyTheSangfroid. This is an edited article that was originally published on AusOpinion.com.
