They really love the Donald! Three Australians travel all the way to NEW YORK to show their support for him

Said 'horror, repulsion and disgust' at Clinton swayed their decision

It may be the American election - but it seems the whole world has an opinion on who should become the next President.

And three Australians even went so far as to travel to New York in order to make their feelings known.  Sporting 'Make America Great Again' caps and Donald Trump badges, the trio were spotted in Times Square stumping for the Republican candidate.

Interviewed by 9 News' Tom Steinfort, the group said they had traveled to be part in a 'once in a lifetime event'.

Asked why he is backing Trump, one man responded: 'Horror, repulsion, disgust - there's a lot more I could throw in there as well. '"Make America great again", absolutely. The ripples will make their way out to Australia.'

Another man added: 'It is a once in a lifetime event. We are never going to see another Donald Trump again.'

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QUT students to pursue defamation suit against Gillian Triggs

About time for someone to call the old bag to account. She'sw just a Leftist bigot who doesn't care what damage she does

Gillian Triggs is under renewed fire and facing a defamation ­action from Queensland University of Technology students who accused her yesterday of making false and damaging statements implying they and their Facebook posts were racist.

The Human Rights Commission president was asked by the students’ barrister Tony Morris QC yesterday to publish a retraction and apology, make no further “defamatory” comments about the students, and pay damages and costs. The warning to Professor Triggs that she faces being sued comes after she told Fairfax Media and the ABC’s 7.30 that the human rights body had acted in “good faith” and in consultation with the students during a 14-month investigation into Facebook posts from May 2013.

QUT staffer Cindy Prior had named seven students in May 2014 in her complaint to the ­commission of racial hatred under section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act over posts they wrote after being told they could not use an indigenous-only computer lab at QUT. In one post, Alex Wood said: “QUT stopping segregation with segregation?”

The claims by Professor Triggs are contradicted by the commission’s internal documents and its acknowledgment in legal letters that it did not tell the students at any stage that they were the ­subject of a complaint for the 14 months from its lodgement by Ms Prior to soon before it was finalised by the rights body.

Internal documents obtained under Freedom of Information show the commission never advised the students or engaged them in any way, despite official guidelines requiring such disclosures to people accused of racial vilification. That was left to QUT and meant the students were not made aware until late July last year, three business day before the commission ran a conciliation conference with Ms Prior.

The students accuse the commission of breaching their human rights by not telling them of the complaint until it was too late to prepare, obtain legal advice and potentially prevent it being escalated to the Federal Circuit Court as a $250,000 damages claim. The claim was thrown out last week, 3½ years after the Facebook posts.

“Much of what you said was knowingly and demonstrably false,” Mr Morris wrote yesterday in a defamation “concerns notice” to Professor Triggs about her ­interview on the ABC’s 7.30 with Leigh Sales.

“You said ‘what we did was do what we normally do which is ­investigate the facts, get a sense of what each of the parties is saying, and then attempt to conciliate the matter’. There was no investigation. There was no attempt to ‘get a sense of what each of the parties is saying’. The truth is that the (commission) sat on the complaint for 14 months, without contacting any of the students or even telling them that a complaint had been made against them.

Only two of the seven students were present at the purported ‘conciliation conference’, and those two students had no more than three business days’ notice to attend.

“You said ‘for 14 months or at least for 12 of those months we ­believed that in good faith we were going to get a conciliation’. It is impossible that the (AHRC) held any such belief — let alone that it held such a belief in ‘good faith’ — when it had not even made contact with (the ­students).”

Mr Morris said Professor Triggs defamed the students when she said on 7.30 that while some cases were vexatious or frivolous, “this was one that had a level of substance”. “The complaints were ones that attracted a certain measure of concern about the nature of the comments that were made,” she said. “I won’t repeat the language but it was worrying and troubling.”

He said her statement meant the students wrote Facebook posts that were “so abhorrently racist that it could not with propriety or dignity be repeated on a mid-­evening television program run by the national broadcaster”. Mr Morris said the claim was “palpably false” and that there was no basis for the accusation his clients used language of such a racist character that she felt it unseemly to repeat on air.

The letter asks Professor Triggs to pay compensation and costs “given that you explicitly claimed on two occasions to be speaking ‘in good faith’, even though you either knew that what you were saying was untrue, or spoke with reckless indifference to the truth or falsity of your remarks”.

One of the students, Calum Thwaites, told The Australian: “I never received one piece of correspondence from the commission. There is absolutely no truth in what she said about that (on Monday night) on 7.30 and to Fairfax Media. She was claiming the students were being consulted from the start by the commission and that there was this ‘good faith’ dialogue but that is completely false.”

The documents include a contemporaneous diary note by a commission officer managing the complaint, showing that less than a week before the conciliation conference she told QUT’s solicitor “it would not be possible to postpone” it; that QUT should have contacted the students; and that “if a student is notified and wants to attend next week, they will have to make time”.

Professor Triggs did not ­respond to a request for comment.

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Turnbull moving Right

He has gone back to the Liberals’ good old days of being tough on asylum seekers, tough on attempts to limit free speech, tough on bids to change the social order through same-sex-marriage.

In the process, Mr Turnbull has consciously diluted personal positions that had set him apart from predecessor Tony Abbott and elevated his standing as the leader the Liberals needed.

The Prime Minister has done little to disguise the crunching noise as he slams policy into reverse gear.

His salvation is the political dividends have been quick to appear.

An Essential poll released late yesterday showed news of the Government’s plan to ban from Australia for life anyone in Manus and Nauru detention sites had been absorbed by voters.

Essential found 56 per cent of voters backed the move, including a thumping 76 per cent of Coalition voters and a significant 52 per cent of Labor supporters.

The base was back, and a few Labor folk had come with them.

Then there was the creation of a parliamentary inquiry into the Racial Discrimination Act and its notorious and often misinterpreted sections 18c and 18d, combined with what some Coalition MPs would see as an opportunity to tame the Human Rights Commission.

It was billed by Attorney-General George Brandis as “an inquiry into

free speech” — which it isn’t. Quite specifically it is about Part 11A of the Racial Discrimination Act , which includes 18c and 18d, and the Human Rights Commission processing of RDA actions.

The sub-topic of whether these elements “impose unreasonable restrictions on freedom of speech” was added for show. And it paid off.

Former Liberal minister and current conservative grump Eric Abetz was most satisfied.

“Very good result,” Senator Abetz, whose stewardship of the Tasmanian Liberal Party saw it lose all House of Representatives seats on July 2, told 2GB yesterday. “I think it’s something that the Australian people want to see.

“One of the precious elements of our democratic fabric is freedom of speech.”

In fact, the RDA had barely rated as a topic outside a clutch of commentators, sources in all parties report.

And the Prime Minister himself as recently as August 31 said the Government had no plans to change 18c, and “we have other more pressing, much more pressing priorities to address”.

But to Mr Turnbull the critical topic is not what he once said, but what a former Labor leader once said.

“Over the last few days, we have heard disturbing echoes of the former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. We’ve obviously heard him on Twitter and on the OpEd pages,” he said, attempting to pummel Bill Shorten with the asylum seeker policies a man who had not been in Parliament since 2013.

The current Opposition is refusing to back the new policy.

What tickled Labor was while Mr Turnbull accused Mr Shorten of “giving in to the left” on the life ban, the Prime Minister was accommodating his right wing at a rate of knots.

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Government puts off the two bills which triggered the double dissolution election

THEY were pieces of legislation so important to the nation Malcolm Turnbull called a double dissolution election to fight for their passage.

But suddenly they have disappeared.

When the Senate returns next week, the bills to revive the Australian Building and Construction Commission, and the registered organisations bill — both linked to workplace laws — will not be on the agenda.

They might appear for a vote during the two following weeks, the final sittings for the year, but chances are they will be put off until next year.

“I can tell you two things,” manager of government business in the Senate Mitch Fifield told ABC radio today in an attempt to not say much at all.

“One is, we are absolutely committed to the ABCC legislation and absolutely committed to the registered organisations legislation.

“We took these bills to a double dissolution election. These are core elements of our agenda.

“And the second thing is, we take our legislative program one week at a time. We have three sitting weeks left.”

The bills’ disappearance is one of the more obvious signs of confusion and apprehension in the Senate over the status of two men m — former senator Bob Day and One Nation‘s Rod Culleton.

The crossbench numbers have been reduced from 11 to nine and no one is certain how this remainder will vote on the big pieces of legislation.

When the Senate resumes on Monday, the first bit of business will be a Government motion to refer doubts over their eligibility to have been elected to Parliament sent to the High Court for a decision.

Labor will support the motion but will take its time giving the Government some thoughts on how it is managing the Upper House.

There will be a break to move to the House of Representatives where Indonesian President Joko Widodo will address a joint sitting.

The rest of the week will be taken up by non-controversial legislation, and by the proposal for a February 11 same-sex marriage plebiscite, which is likely to be defeated.

In the House of Representatives, the Government will introduce legislation to put a lifetime ban on asylum seekers who arrive by boat ever getting to Australia, even as tourists from third countries.

Labor sees this legislation as a bid to divide it on the asylum seeker debate and not a genuine attempt to prevent more boat arrivals.

That debate in the Lower House is expected to be protracted and the legislation might not make it into the Senate in three sitting weeks.

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Margaret Court calls fault: ABC maligned my beliefs

Tennis great Margaret Court says she felt maligned by the ABC for her religious beliefs and opposition to gay marriage in interviews to promote her book.

Court, a Perth-based Christian pastor, said the broadcaster was one-sided, barely touching on her church charity work.

She did 22 media appearances to promote her autobiography, including eight with the ABC, but said the national broadcaster was the only outlet that seemed to have an agenda.

“They weren’t really interested in my tennis much; all they were interested in was hitting my beliefs for standing for marriage between a man and a woman,” Court said. “I think we have to look at the fact this is happening, because it was not very nice in there — it was horrible, it was below-the-belt stuff.

“What has gone wrong? It used to be full of good religious programs ... There was nothing about Christianity in my interviews, it was all on gay marriage.”

This morning a delegation of religious leaders will meet ABC managing director Michelle Guthrie to argue against planned cuts to religious programming. The delegation will include the Catholic Archbishop of Brisbane Mark Coleridge and priest Frank Brennan, former South Australian Premier and Anglican priest Lynn Arnold and World Vision chief executive Tim Costello.

Court, a grand slam champion with 24 major titles, has stirred controversy with her hard­line views, including saying she did not want Martina Navratilova to win Wimbledon because she was gay.

Court said the interviews were particularly confronting on prerecorded shows One Plus One with Jane Hutcheon, Radio National Drive with Patricia Karvelas and on ABC Goulburn Murray with Gaye Pattison.

An ABC spokesman said several programs had agreed to ­interview Court while she promoted her book, which mentioned gay marriage. “In this context ABC presenters asked her a broad range of questions relating to her sporting career, life after tennis and her Christian beliefs,” he said.

Court acknowledged she deserved scrutiny, but said most ABC interviewers did not seek to understand her point of view: “It would have been nice if they had come from: why do you have such strong beliefs in this area?”

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Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here