A senior government minister has called into question the integrity of the nation's human rights chief after Gillian Triggs backed away from evidence she gave to a Senate committee.
"She would have to clear this up very quickly as it goes to her character," Immigration Minister Peter Dutton told Ray Hadley on 2GB radio on Thursday as the long-running row between Professor Triggs and the government took a new twist.
Mr Dutton claimed the Human Rights Commission president had misled the Senate's legal and constitutional affairs committee when she blamed journalists for manufacturing quotes and quoting her out of context.
Prof Triggs and other commissioners were subject to more than six hours of questioning from senators on Tuesday.
The commission president was quizzed about comments to The Saturday Paper in which she fumed at "seriously ill-informed and uneducated" politicians questioning her work.
Prof Triggs claimed some quotes were inaccurate and others had been "taken out of context".
She denied suggesting she could have "destroyed" the committee by challenging its authority, insisting the quote was put in by a sub-editor.
On Wednesday, after learning the newspaper had an audio recording of the interview, Prof Triggs sought to "clarify" her evidence to the committee by accepting the article was an accurate excerpt from a longer interview,.
Liberal senator Ian Macdonald, who chairs the Senate committee, told The Australian that Prof Triggs' conflicted evidence exposed an "apparent deception" of the parliament.
