Don’t take our word for it. Go straight to the horses mouth, or in this case, the bigot’s mouth.

In a stunning blow to freedom of expression in Australia, the President of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Mr John von Doussa, QC, today declared that a letter to the editor written by Associate Professor Andrew Fraser and published in the Parramatta Sun on 6 July 2006 was an unlawful breach of s 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.
—
Newhouse Lawyers demanded that Professor Fraser “should cause to be published at his expense an advertisement in the Parramatta Sun (of a size no smaller than the Letter and no less prominent) acknowledging that he engaged in unlawful conduct by means of the Letter and Comments, unreservedly apologising for the hurt thereby caused to the Sudanese people who live in the Parramatta-Blacktown area, promising not to repeat such conduct and retracting on the public record all of the imputations.�

Mr von Doussa has invited Professor Fraser to submit to this neo-Stalinist ritual of self-abasement.

Professor Fraser will not accept that invitation. But, in all likelihood, that will not be the end of the matter. It can be assumed that, if this “conciliation� proposal is rejected, Newhouse Lawyers will pursue Professor Fraser into the Federal Court, in an effort to ruin him financially by winning an order of costs against him.

Andrew Fraser
Associate Professor
Department of Public Law
Macquarie University
Sydney, NSW
AUSTRALIA 2109
dfraser@humn.mq.edu.au

Awwww, poor highly qualified legal professional THINKS he is looking down the barrel at some tort-filled fun. “Thinks” because it’s a pretty big presumption to make that Newhouse’s crew plan on dragging Fraser’s sorry behind into the Federal Court. No complaints here if they do but please Drew, stop playing the “poor me” card. We know that political/financial martyrdom plays to a packed house in white supremacist circles but you’re certainly not fooling anyone outside of that narrow, marginalised rubric.

What is interesting here is that back when all this hoo-haa kicked off, Fraser was repeatedly warned that his invoking of the university’s name in his private racially based activities would be sufficient cause for further discipline.

Oh well. Drew only has two months left to run on his contract so he probably isn’t caring. Word on campus is that the good Prof is back teaching “something” this semester (his public law classes aren’t running).