'The Minister's office has been approached'

The Australian Human Rights Commission is not having a good year.

From mass staff resignations to heated Senate Estimates hearings to allegations of employees being punished for supporting Palestine, the Commission’s stance (or lack thereof) on the genocide in Gaza has been a near-constant source of negative publicity and internal dysfunction.

Now, the cofounders of anti-racism organisation Hue Consulting are going public with their experiences working with the Commission. Hue cofounders Sonia Sofat and Elsa Tuet-Rosenberg claim that members of the Commission’s senior leadership abruptly curtailed a $77,665 contract with Hue in April of this year under pressure from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, The Australian and the federal Attorney-General’s Department.

Sofat says their experience raises “serious concerns for community members about the Commission’s ability to fulfil its responsibilities as a trustworthy and independent statutory body”. 

“I never imagined we would be in this kind of situation with the Australian Human Rights Commission,” Sofat says. “The misleading, the unprofessionalism and the general lack of good-faith behaviour from the Commission seriously jeopardises the trust that communities experiencing racism and genocide have in the Commission to investigate and protect their human rights.”

Through Freedom of Information laws, Sofat and Tuet-Rosenberg have obtained nearly 200 pages of internal Commission documents that reveal how members of the Commission’s senior leadership moved quickly to reduce the Hue contract after being contacted by ECAJ co-CEO Peter Wertheim and the publication of a negative story about the contract in The Australian.

The documents reveal that the Attorney-General’s Department repeatedly contacted members of the Commission’s senior leadership in response to The Australian’s article, and that then-Commission President Rosalind Croucher personally contacted Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus with updates on the Commission’s planned response.

The internal communications, and emails between Hue and the Commission released by Sofat and Tuet-Rosenberg, also indicate that Commission chief executive Leanne Smith may have repeatedly given untrue evidence about the incident to the Senate while appearing before parliament’s Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee in May.

Many of the FOI’s documents are heavily redacted. I am not publishing the FOI in full to protect the privacy of lower-level Commission employees, but a full copy of the FOI can be requested from the Commission. If you are a current or former Commission employee who can shed more light on the FOI documents’ contents, please feel free to reach out.

Some quotations have been slightly edited for the purpose of clarity or consistency, such as replacing ‘AHRC’ or ‘HRC’ with ‘Commission’. Any horizontal black lines in the images below indicate separate documents that I’ve put together to make the context clearer.

‘Would you kindly look into the matter and let me know’

In October 2023, the Commission contracted Hue to complete a body of work within the Commission’s Racism. It Stops With Me campaign, as well as its upcoming National Anti-Racism Framework project. Hue was to prepare and deliver educational resources about anti-racism for the Commission’s work in primary schools.

Hue proposed to adapt one of their previous projects, the Australian High School Anti-Racism Kit, for an audience of primary school-age kids in years five and six. Internal Commission emails show this proposal was warmly received by the Commission’s Racial Discrimination Team, which had carriage of the project; one email in June 2023 described it as “a proposal that greatly aligns with RDT goals at this time”.

The first 68 pages of the 193-page FOI transcript cover internal Commission communications regarding the Hue contract from May to October 2023, when Hue was chosen as the preferred supplier of the educational resources and the contract between Hue and the Commission was approved by Smith as the Commission’s chief executive. The bulk of them discuss logistical, compliance and intellectual property issues with the tender, including approving a budget increase from $50,000 to $77,665 and sourcing artwork for the website from First Nations artists.

Of particular significance was the decision by Hue and the Commission to host the educational resources on a standalone website designed to appeal to students, rather than on the Commission’s website or the Racism. It Stops With Me site.

“Through the procurement process, there was such a long back and forth about where it would be hosted,” Sofat says. “[The Commission] acknowledged that it couldn’t be accessibly hosted on their platform because it wouldn’t have the features that we wanted it to have and young people wouldn’t be engaged with it in the same way if it were hosted on the bare-bones platform capability they have on their website.”

Throughout those first 68 pages, most of the discussions about the contract are held between lower-level Commission employees, primarily members of the Racial Discrimination Team. The involvement of the Commission’s senior leadership is minimal, largely consisting of approvals and signoffs.

That changed drastically on March 18 of this year, when then-Commission President Rosalind Croucher received an email from ECAJ co-CEO Peter Wertheim raising concerns about the Commission’s contract with Hue.

“Our concern is that Ms Rosenberg is one of the people who were reportedly prolific sharers of the leaked personal details of Jewish creatives from a WhatsApp group, which led to the Prime Minister moving to ban the online form of harassment (known as ‘doxing’),” Wertheim wrote.

“In our view, if Ms Rosenberg was involved in the mass-doxing of the Jewish creatives group, then it is not appropriate for her to be engaged by the Australian Human Rights Commission in any capacity to do anti-racism work. Would you kindly look into the matter and let me know, preferably by cob [close of business] tomorrow, whether Ms Rosenberg continues to have any anti-racism role with the Commission and, if so, why this is considered appropriate.”

Among the Commission’s senior leadership, knowledge of the contract’s details before Croucher received Wertheim’s message appears to have been minimal. On the same afternoon, a staff member emailed Croucher “as requested” with basic details about the contract, including that it was for the provision of educational anti-racism resources in primary schools and that it was executed in October 2023. That evening, longtime Commission senior policy executive Darren Dick asked a Commission staff member who at Hue was working on the resources, and if Tuet-Rosenberg was “directly involved”.

The next day, Croucher sent Wertheim a prepared response, saying: “We closely scrutinise all contracting arrangements as part of regular due diligence processes for all external contracting arrangements.” Croucher also offered to set up a meeting between herself, Wertheim and new Race Discrimination Commissioner Giridharan Sivaraman within a fortnight.

‘Urgent meeting today for all available Commissioners’

On the morning of Wednesday March 20, the Commission’s media unit received a request for comment from Alexi Demetriadi, The Australian’s NSW political correspondent. Demetriadi asserted that “Tuet-Rosenberg widely shared hundreds of social media posts relating to the February doxxing of 600 Jewish creatives” and asked if the Commission was considering cancelling the Hue contract.

That afternoon, Smith received an email from Petra Gartmann, assistant secretary of the Attorney General Department’s human rights branch, seeking “urgent advice” about The Australian’s upcoming story about Tuet-Rosenberg.

Smith then told Croucher, Sivaraman and Dick that “the Minister’s office has been approached about Hue and want some urgent responses”.

On the morning of Thursday March 21, The Australian published Demetriadi’s first article about the Hue contract. Besides accusing Tuet-Rosenberg in its headline of “doxx[ing] Jewish creatives,” the article featured extensive quotes from Wertheim, who called Tuet-Rosenberg “the last person who should be under contract to the AHRC, especially for the purposes of an anti-racism campaign”; Liberal MP Julian Leeser, who urged the Commission to “rip its contract up”; and Australian Jewish Association CEO Robert Gregory, who said the Hue contract was “further proof that the AHRC only advocates for the interests of certain minorities”.

At 9.24 that morning, Smith emailed Croucher calling for “an urgent meeting today for all available Commissioners” to discuss the Hue contract and The Australian’s article. A Zoom meeting with all available Commissioners and Commission general counsel Julie O’Brien was scheduled for 12.30 that afternoon.

In an email to all Commissioners an hour before the meeting started, Croucher noted several “key points,” including that the “contract needs careful review” and that the “political environment [is] heightened”.

Later that afternoon, Croucher sent a text message to Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus calling the allegations raised in The Australian’s article “extremely serious and alarming” and recounting how the Commission’s senior leadership had responded since receiving the first communication from Peter Wertheim.

“Our CEO has reviewed the procurement; General counsel reviewed the contract. We are in the process of collecting available information and analysing,” Croucher wrote. “Happy to discuss, always, at any time.”

Dreyfus did not respond.

Responding to questions, the Attorney-General’s Department provided the following:

“The Attorney-General’s Department did not provide instructions to the Australian Human Rights Commission on this matter. This was acknowledged by Ms Leanne Smith, Chief Executive Officer at the Commission, at the 31 May Estimates hearing of the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee.”

 “The Commission is an independent statutory agency and any decision relating to the Hue contract and its management is a matter for the Commission.”

‘The faces of a hideous hatred’

It was not the first time Tuet-Rosenberg had been the subject of an inflammatory and misleading article in The Australian. By the time the Hue contract became a source of contention at the Commission, Demetriadi and The Australian had already published several articles targeting Tuet-Rosenberg over her involvement in the leaked transcript of the ‘J.E.W.I.S.H Australian creatives and Academics’ WhatsApp group in January. Tuet-Rosenberg was one of the activists who facilitated the transcript’s release, including by redacting personal information that members of the group had posted in the chat.

On February 15, Demetriadi and Australian associate editor John Ferguson published an article about Tuet-Rosenberg and other pro-Palestinian activists on the newspaper’s front page. The article published several photos of Tuet-Rosenberg alongside a headline reading: ‘The faces of a hideous hatred that has no place in Australia’.

Two days later, Australian commentator Gemma Tognini published an opinion piece describing the leak of the WhatsApp transcript as “evil” and “a form of terrorism,” and the activists who leaked it as “social terrorists” using “weapons of mass doxxing” to wage an antisemitic hate campaign against Jewish people. The article was accompanied by another photo of Tuet-Rosenberg.

Tuet-Rosenberg was also named in a February article in The Jewish Independent (formerly Plus61J Media) that was syndicated in Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

“Zionists really, really hate when Jewish people speak out in this way – it undermines their narrative. Being a racialised person, I think, makes it easier for them to target me,” Tuet-Rosenberg says. “My dad has Muslim ancestry, and in a lot of the articles they attempt to bring that up, I think to discredit or invalidate my opinions or raise Islamophobic and racist tropes.”

“Many of these articles go into weird amounts of detail into my ethnic background, my involvement in Asian theatre. It’s weird.”

Missing from this coverage is any mention of the fact that multiple members of the WhatsApp group were coordinating to have artists, writers, actors, academics, journalists and others who’ve expressed support for Palestine fired, denied work, professionally censured or otherwise silenced. Nor is there mention of the fact that activists painstakingly redacted the personal details of the groupchat’s members.*

(Note: the above paragraph previously stated that “the transcript was leaked to pro-Palestinian activists by someone in the groupchat itself”. This is incorrect.)

"Why would you post your phone number in a group of more than 600 people? People posted their street addresses!” Tuet-Rosenberg says. “The opsec was an absolute nightmare!"

(Note: The file of the WhatsApp transcript that was widely shared among pro-Palestinian activists is named ‘No_Numbers_Emails_or_Addresses’. I know because I have a copy and have reported on its contents extensively.)

Given the ongoing media attacks, Tuet-Rosenberg and Sofat sought reassurance from their contact at the Commission that The Australian article would not affect their contract or working relationship.

“When we first got the notification from the journalist and the article came out – which made it clear that they had spoken to the AHRC, because they had quotes – we spoke to our direct contact at the AHRC before we had the meeting with senior AHRC leadership, and they reassured us that our contract was fine,” Tuet-Rosenberg says.

“Even before any of the articles came out, I asked our direct contact about whether the AHRC was supportive of a pro-Palestinian organisation, and they said it was all fine. I even said ‘if it helps, I’m Jewish,’ and they said ‘yeah, we told [senior leadership] that and it did help’. “

However, Sofat and Tuet-Rosenberg did not know that members of the Commission’s senior leadership had instructed Commission employees to go through Hue’s social media posts.

On Friday March 22, Dick requested an unnamed Commission employee to prepare a memo summarising Hue’s social media posts going back to October 1, 2023. The employee sent the document, titled ‘Hue. Colour the Conversation website and social media summary from October 1 2023’, to Dick and O’Brien the following Monday, March 25.

‘It was just the biggest gaslight’

On Friday March 22, Croucher wrote to all Commissioners that “there is continued information gathering in relation to HUE, in light of the Australian article yesterday. We have a Commissioners’ meeting scheduled for Monday afternoon so this will be a priority matter for update.”

A meeting between Hue’s cofounders and Smith, Dick and O’Brien was also scheduled for that Monday, March 25, but did not take place until Thursday April 4 as Sonia Sofat was on personal leave. Giridharan Sivaraman did not attend, but he and Croucher were invited to an internal “prep meeting” among the Commission’s senior leadership prior to the meeting with Hue.

Sofat and Tuet-Rosenberg entered the meeting with apprehension. In the leadup, their repeated requests that their main Commission contact in the Racial Disctimination Team, with whom they had been working for months, attend the planned meeting had gone unanswered. Instead, they were now meeting with the Commission’s chief executive, chief legal counsel and a senior policy executive, none of whom they had met or spoken to before.

They did not know that the Commission’s senior leadership had already decided to keep the Commission’s Racial Discrimination Team out of the meeting. “Given the sensitivities I would propose we keep participation pretty high level,” Smith wrote on April 2.

Then and now, Sofat finds the sudden escalation of the Hue contract into a matter of priority for the Commission’s senior leadership baffling.

“Seeing [in the emails] how they escalated the conversations made us ask, ‘What is this?’” she says. “We’re just this little organisation trying to fight racism in Australia, and suddenly they’re calling meetings with all the commissioners, getting everyone across what’s happening. It’s such a waste of resources! Are there no human rights abuses going on in this country, that all these very senior people need to be working on this?”

At Hue’s request, the Commission also prepared and sent through the meeting’s planned agenda. Its one item was ‘Discussion on recent media concerning Hue Consulting’.

When the meeting took place, the fears and apprehensions Sofat and Tuet-Rosenberg had been feeling crystallised.

“It was a very odd meeting, very clinical – it was like we were being observed,” Sofat says. “Even when we offered to share more about the situation – the targeting, in particular, that Elsa had been through – they weren’t receptive to hearing more about it. They offered no empathy.”

“It was such a racist space to be in. We haven’t even recovered from the trauma of that, to be honest.”

In the meeting, Tuet-Rosenberg told the Commission’s attendees that she was being targeted in the media for her involvement in the leaking of the WhatsApp transcript, explained the organised attempts within it to “silence, deplatform and fire people who were supporting Palestinians,” and outlined the efforts she and other activists had taken to protect the personal details of its members. She says her explanations fell on deaf ears.

“It was clear that what actually happened didn’t really matter to them, or that I had been racially vilified and targeted by the media,” Tuet-Rosenberg says. “It didn’t even seem to matter much to them that a genocide was happening. I said to them point-blank: ‘Have you taken a position on the genocide? Because you’re kind of taking a position in the way you’re navigating this situation.’ They said they hadn’t.”

“I don’t think the contents of that meeting meant anything. It was just a formality to their exiting us.”

On Friday April 19, Leanne Smith wrote that she had had “another meeting” with the Attorney-General’s Department and detailing that the Commission’s senior leadership would meet to make a final decision regarding the Hue contract on the following Monday, April 22.

“We need to make a decision,” she wrote.

In response to questions, the Commission stated:

“The Commission is an independent statutory institution and decisions about the Commission’s work are made independently of government and in the best interests of the Commission and the work we undertake to protect and promote human rights in Australia.

“As a portfolio agency of the Attorney-General’s Department, the Commission liaises on a regular basis with departmental staff on a range of issues which are relevant to the work of the Commission, and any correspondence or meetings with departmental staff occur within this context.”

‘This decision has caught us by surprise’

By Tuesday April 23, it had been decided within the Commission to reduce the scope of the Hue contract and bring its end date forward; a letter was sent to Hue the following day alerting them to the proposed changes.

In response to Sofat asking for “insight into the concerns clearly outlined that have led to this decision,” Smith sent a follow-up email on April 29 outlining the Commission’s reasons for reducing the contract: to “[ensure] community confidence in the independence and impartiality of the Commission as Australia’s National Human Rights Institution,” and that “endeavouring to host the anti-racism resources on the Commission’s website may assist in … ensuring that the resources reach the widest possible audience”.

To Sofat and Tuet-Rosenberg, neither explanation rang true.

“One of the reasons they gave in the meeting was that ‘we want to make sure all communities feel like they can access us’,” Tuet-Rosenberg says. “I said, ‘what communities do you mean? I’m a Jewish person and I’m working with you, so what kind of communities are you talking about?’ And they were pretty evasive, but that was the reason they gave.”

Nor did they find convincing the Commission’s explanation that the educational resources would be more effective on the Commission’s website.

“The due diligence was done. We spent three months back and forth on the hosting element with their comms team,” Sofat says. “It was very odd that they suddenly started going against their own advice. It was a very disingenuous element to these conversations. We even put in writing that we didn’t think it was the right path to go down, especially from an accessibility point of view.”

Appearing before Senate Estimates a month later on May 31, Smith admitted under questioning from Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi that the Commission’s real reason for reducing the contract was different to the reasons Smith had given Hue, and that the Commission had decided to take “a different approach”.

Smith admitted that the Commission had received “some public engagement around some of the activity of one particular director of Hue Consulting, in the public domain, which raised community concerns”.

Smith disputed Faruqi’s assertion that this constituted “lying to the contractor as to why you ended the contract with them”.

Smith also told Senate Estimates that Hue had agreed to the contract being reduced. Sofat disputes this, saying it “was one of many glaring inconsistencies in the evidence presented to the Estimates Committee about the Hue contract”.

An email exchange between Smith and Sofat earlier that month appears to confirm Sofat’s account. In an email sent to Smith and other members of the Commission’s senior leadership on May 8, Sofat said the Commission’s decision “has caught us by surprise” and urged the Commission “to reconsider this decision and allow us to complete the project as was originally set out”.

“We are concerned with the decision to end this contract so abruptly and are still unclear on why this decision was made,” Sofat wrote. “The cancellation comes to us as a surprise after undergoing an almost year long procurement process that the Commission itself has affirmed was done thoroughly and under close scrutiny and due diligence. We feel that we have been unfairly discriminated against and the escalation and the handling of this situation hasn't been in good faith, and is certainly not anti-racist.”

Smith also told Senate Estimates that the Commission had not received “instructions” from the Attorney-General’s Department to take action on the Hue contract, and disputed Greens Senator David Shoebridge’s assertion that the Commission had shortened the contract in response to the negative article in The Australian.

“I find that insulting,” she stated.

Smith also stated she didn’t know whether the Commission had been contacted by Demetriadi, or whether the Attorney-General’s Department had contacted the Commission regarding The Australian’s article.

In response to questions, the Commission stated:

“The Commission has a responsibility to ensure we engage constructively and respectfully with all communities in Australia and the social media activity of Hue staff was assessed as creating challenges for our community engagement activities, our conciliation work and for community engagement with any education resources hosted by Hue. As we informed Hue, the Commission’s priority was that the anti-racism resources developed under the contract be as effective as possible and reach the widest possible audience.

“As previously stated by Commission staff in meetings with Hue and in response to questions during Senate Estimates, the decision to vary Hue’s contract was made in line with the provisions in the contract and the variation was agreed to by Hue when they signed the variation to the contract.”

Sofat and Tuet-Rosenberg are also critical of Race Discrimination Commissioner Giridharan Sivaraman. While he had been in the role for only two weeks when the Hue contract became an internal issue, it fell within his purview. They claim he never responded to their appeals to his office for help.

“Throughout all of this, we directly contacted Sivaraman,” Sofat says. “We emailed him directly and asked him what was happening and for his intervention, and we never got any response from him about this. Given the context of what was happening, and that the contract actually sat within his portfolio, that felt like very poor form.”

On November 26, Sivaraman will give the keynote address at the Commission’s launch of its new National Anti-Racism Framework at an invite-only event at Parramatta Town Hall.

‘I maybe wasn’t distrusting enough’

More than six months on, the Commission’s decision to reduce the Hue contract is still affecting Tuet-Rosenberg, Sofat and Hue.

The media attacks on Tuet-Rosenberg and Hue continue. Earlier this month, North Sydney Council mayor Zoë Baker cancelled a contract with Hue to facilitate an anti-racism training event for the Lower North Shore Multicultural Network after the Daily Telegraph rehashed The Australian’s previous claims about Tuet-Rosenberg.

Besides featuring extensive quotes from Ryvchin, the article quotes a letter to North Sydney Council from an unnamed person claiming that “the social media profiles of both Hue itself and both its founders are rife with highly politicised and controversial content targeting Jewish Australians”.

I do not tolerate racism,” Baker says in the article. “On a very personal note, this is an issue close to my heart — my beloved stepfather and extended family are Jewish, having arrived in Sydney and settled in Yeo Street, Neutral Bay in 1954 and my husband is Caribbean English.”

It appears journalists are contacting other organisations that work with Hue in an apparent attempt to pressure them into cancelling their contracts.

'“We know at least three of our contracts have received contact from journalists,” Tuet-Rosenberg says. “Those are the ones we know about.”

“We’ve had a number of contacts from organisations looking to work with us, and had those conversations end very abruptly,” Sofat says. “It’s definitely narrowed the pool of people working with us.”

“We’ve actively had to downsize our organisation in this last year. Prior to that we were growing and the anti-racism conversations in Australia were growing.”

Besides the financial and professional fallout, the wider damage to Hue’s reputation, and to Sofat’s and Tuet-Rosenberg’s, has been significant. The Australian’s ‘faces of hatred’ article was later cited by ECAJ in their submission to the federal Senate inquiry on antisemitism on university campuses.

“They’ve all started referencing each other and using each other’s information as fact,” Tuet-Rosenberg says. “I even saw my name was suddenly on Wikipedia as having committed some antisemitic hate crimes, and using those articles again to back that up.”

That Wikipedia page, ‘Antisemitism during the Israel-Hamas war’, is still live. Citing the articles in Haaretz and The Australian, it accuses Tuet-Rosenberg and others of “[launching] a doxxing campaign against Jewish creatives in Australia”.

“It’s a time-suck,” Sofat says. “Every time we get a media request or another article, there’s fallout. We spend time on how we’re going to deal with it, the article comes out, and the anxiety and the stress of it and the time that it takes up when we could be doing so many other things. The emotional labour of all that has had a big impact.”

Sofat says she warned the Commission’s senior leadership that reducing the Hue contract would have this effect, especially given many people are unaware of the context around it.

“We said this to the Commission,” she says. “We said: ‘if you do this, it’s going to set a dangerous precedent. It’s the Human Rights Commission essentially cancelling an anti-racism organisation. It’s going to set a dangerous precedent for anyone doing anti-racism work, anyone who’s anti-genocide or pro-Palestine, or for Palestinians in the community. This is a dangerous path to be going down. If you’re here to represent all communities, this is not going to build trust – we are from the very communities we’re talking about’.”

“I think a lot of people don’t know how we have been treated by the Commission and how they are making decisions at the moment and that’s a problem. People see that they’ve ended a contract with us and go ‘oh no! The Human Rights Commission is an upstanding organisation.’ Which is not our experience. The ramifications of their decision continue to snowball. They’re just moving on with their lives, but it keeps popping up for us everywhere.”

“I have a pretty healthy distrust of most institutions. The reason we do work with organisations like this, or any organisation, is because of the racism that exists within them,” Tuet-Rosenberg says. “That’s our work – we come in, we provide education and resources, facilitation around anti-racism, so some level of racism within the organisation is kind of assumed when we’re doing that work.”

“Even though I’m not surprised at the Commission and the actions that they’ve taken, there were parts of me that were surprised. I maybe wasn’t distrusting enough.”

Fundraiser for Noor and Hoor Hammad

If you’ve got anything to spare, please consider giving some money to this fundraiser I’m running for Noor Hammad, a young mum in Gaza, and her baby daughter Hoor. Any money raised will be sent to Noor's brother Abdallah Abdalrahim, who lives in Sweden and can send her money directly.

What I’m looking at

• The Nation — The case against Joe Biden for complicity in genocide

• Electronic Intifada — NY Times killed investigation of Israeli hooligans, internal email reveals

• This speech by left-wing Palestinian MP Ayman Odeh to the Knesset, for which he was removed from the chamber