The Australian federal police has confirmed it is investigating whether the attorney general, George Brandis, broke the law by offering the Human Rights Commission president, Gillian Triggs, a job in exchange for her resignation, but Tony Abbott has said there was no impropriety.
The shadow attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, wrote to the AFP asking it to “urgently investigate the allegation that senator Brandis offered an inducement to secure Professor Triggs’ resignation”.
The AFP confirmed it had received a referral from Dreyfus on Wednesday morning.
“The AFP will evaluate this referral as per usual processes,” it said in a statement. “While this process is ongoing it would not be appropriate to comment further.”
During an explosive seven-hour estimates hearing on Tuesday, Triggs revealed the secretary of the attorney general’s department, Chris Moraitis, had approached her with an offer from Brandis of another undisclosed government position in exchange for her resignation from the commission.
At a media conference in Sydney on Wednesday, the prime minister insisted there was nothing untoward about the approach.
“Calm, calm, calm,” Abbott told reporters.
“I’ll address this [question and] then it’s time to go back to Canberra and it’s very simple. It’s very simple. The government has lost confidence in Gillian Triggs as president of the Human Rights Commission. We’ve lost confidence in her.
“What she does is a matter for her but as the secretary of the attorney general’s department has made clear, she was not asked to resign and no inducement has been offered.”
The communications minister, Malcolm Turnbull, declined to criticise Triggs or her performance in the role as commissioner, describing her on Wednesday as a “very distinguished international legal academic”.
He said discussion of her partisanship or otherwise “misses the main point”.
“The main point is the children,” he said. “Children in detention is something nobody wants. The issue is not Gillian Triggs, or personalities, or arguments about the Human Rights Commission. The issue is the children. All of us as parents in particular know how anguished it must be for children to be in these circumstances.
“The bottom line is this: one child in detention is one child too many. Everyone is anguished by having children locked up in detention.”
Triggs’s recent report on children in detention has angered the government, which accused her of a partisan “stitch-up” over its reporting of harsh conditions and abuse faced by children held in immigration detention under the current and previous government.
Triggs told the estimates hearing of the offer from Moraitis: “I rejected it out of hand. I thought it was a disgraceful proposal.”
Brandis told the estimates hearing he had “lost confidence” in Triggs and her capacity to perform her role impartially.
The United Nations-recognised international human rights peak body has condemned the government’s attack on Triggs.
The International Coordinating Committee of National Institutions for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights (ICC) has written to the prime minister expressing “grave concern” at the government’s request for Triggs to resign.
“These public attacks seek to call into question the independence of the office which Professor Triggs holds,” the ICC’s chairman, Mabedle Lawrence Mushwana, wrote from Geneva, “and ... undermines and intimidates the statutorily granted independence that is provided to the country’s principal human rights body.”
Last year Australia was lead sponsor of a Human Rights Council resolution that stated: “National human rights institutions and their respective members and staff should not face any form of reprisal or intimidation, including political pressure, physical intimidation, harassment or unjustifiable budgetary limitations, as a result of activities undertaken in accordance with their respective mandates, including when taking up individual cases or when reporting on serious or systematic violations in their countries.”
Mushwana said that in a healthy democracy, reports such as Triggs’s should be received in the spirit of improving the rights of the most vulnerable.
“It is understandable, and even to be expected that independent national human rights institution reports will contain information that is critical of government or unpopular,” he said. “This is in order to bring attention to human rights that are being violated or areas in which human rights may be improved.”
