Laura Tingle has courageously spoken out about the pervasive issue of racism in Australia, a country where systemic discrimination continues to affect many communities. According to the Australian Human Rights Commission, one in five Australians has experienced racial discrimination. It's crucial that we acknowledge and address these issues to foster a more inclusive society. Sign this petition to show your support for Laura Tingle and her important statements on racism in Australia.

What’s all the fuss about?
In the context of a discussion about immigration, during which she referred to a previous remark by Savva, Tingle said:

On the night of Peter Dutton’s address-in-reply to the budget, I was sitting there with this terrible chill running through me thinking, okay, we’re back into this territory. I don’t think […] we’ve had the leader of a major political party saying everything that is going wrong in this country is because of migrants.
She continued:

I had this sudden flash of people turning up to try to rent a property or at an auction, and they look a bit different – whatever you define different as – and he has given a licence for them to be abused where people feel they are missing out. We’re a racist country, let’s face it. We always have been and it’s very depressing and a terrible prospect for the next election.

These comments were reported in The Australian, which quoted Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce attacking the ABC as being “mad left-wing”. It also quoted the opposition spokesman on communications, David Coleman, as saying the comments were “extraordinary and completely indefensible”, and Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price describing Tingle as “blatantly partisan”.

This has all the hallmarks of a beat-up, the initial reporting being spiced with adjectives and adverbs – “extraordinary”, “controversial”, “bizarrely” – and followed up by a story, denied by the ABC, that board members have had “emergency discussions” about her remarks.

Were Tingle’s remarks partisan? Of course. They were statements of her opinions, clearly and obviously so.

Do they reflect on her impartiality as a journalist? No. They were made informally as part of a panel discussion in which issues of immigration and race were canvassed. She was not doing journalism. Moreover, Tingle was not there representing the ABC or the 7.30 program. She was there because, like all the other members of the panel, she has expertise in federal politics.

The counterargument is that in her person, she is inseparable from her role as 7.30’s chief political correspondent. That is not reasonable. It would be to deny her an existence outside her job. If she had been there as a representative of the ABC or of the program, it would be different, but that was not the position.