'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.