PETER VAN ONSELEN: This is the REAL absurdity at the heart of Antoinette Lattouf's court victory over the ABC - as public broadcaster wastes $1.1million of YOUR money on a spat with the casual radio presenter

Daily Mail​

6 hours ago

By any measure, sacking someone with just two shifts to go on a five-day contract is absurd.
Doing so in the middle of a political firestorm, triggering a courtroom circus that dragged in the broadcaster's top brass and cost over a million dollars in legal fees, defies belief.
But that is what the ABC did to Antoinette Lattouf, who has 'won' her legal case against the public broadcaster.
And for what? A $70,000 payout with a finding that the ABC breached the Fair Work Act.
She'll declare victory and claim vindication - and Lattouf is now skirting around the fringes of media, hiring the same PR team as Abbie Chatfield and launching a 'media literacy and critique' venture.
For the ABC's part, it could have simply let her finish her shifts, distanced itself from her views in the meantime and never hired her again.
All without the consequences we've now seen play out. Or it could have never hired her in the first place for that five-day contract and none of this would have happened.
For a public broadcaster, clinging to an annual budget of over one billion dollars of taxpayers' money, this was bureaucratic buffoonery of the highest order.
Let's be clear: this isn't about whether Lattouf should have kept her gig.
It's not about free speech, race, or even social media boundaries for journalists, although all those themes were trotted out during the saga.
It's about proportionality, common sense and the sort of managerial judgement you'd hope for from an adult organisation.
She had two shifts left. Two! What was to be gained by cutting her mid-week and mid-contract?
Even if you thought Lattouf's posts were tone-deaf, inappropriate or politically fraught, surely the smarter play was to let her quietly finish the week and then, behind closed doors, make sure she was never invited back again.
That's how any competent employer deals with a short-term casual arrangement. Instead, the ABC turned a temporary contract into a federal case, literally.
Now it's facing the consequences. The court found the ABC breached the Fair Work Act by terminating her, in part, over her political views on the Israel-Gaza conflict.
The claim that she was discriminated against based on her race didn't hold up -- those allegations were rejected outright.
But the finding on political opinion was enough to trigger a payout.
And let's not forget, this all comes after $1.1 million of public money was ultimately wasted on external legal fees. Over a fill-in radio host, no less.
Even Lattouf, for all her victory-lap commentary to come, must wonder whether the whole thing was worth it.
No matter the outcome, she's now a lightning rod in media circles, a name entangled with internal ABC politics and Middle Eastern geopolitics.
Perhaps she will be happy with that - who knows.
But the real embarrassment belongs to the ABC. It overreacted and got caught trying to manage its image, rather than manage its staff, and now gets to wear the badge of 'Fair Work violator'.
It gets worse when you see the internal chatter dragged into the daylight. Former chair Ita Buttrose was joking in emails about Lattouf calling in sick to avoid embarrassment. The managing director was texting about an 'Antoinette problem'.
Not exactly the kind of cool-headed leadership one expects in a crisis. The ABC seemed more interested in damage control than employment law compliance, that's for sure.
At the centre of the case was a Human Rights Watch post Lattouf shared accusing Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war.
The fact is, it didn't happen on air. There was no live rant, no breach of ABC editorial guidelines in the studio.
The offending posts were external and the ABC's own evidence about whether she'd been clearly told not to post was at best a murky mess of suggestions, warnings and 'we'd rather you didn't do it' nudges.
In the end, the ABC was hoisted by its own indecision.
If they'd simply handled the matter with some quiet professionalism, finishing her contract, documenting concerns and moving on, they wouldn't be writing a cheque with your money after today's decision.
Instead, they manufactured a high-profile debacle over a contract that would've expired naturally within 48 hours.