Lattouf wins

Australia Broadcast Center

30-06-2025

TAYLOR AIKEN: Walking from court, victorious.
ANTOINETTE LATTOUF: I was punished for my political opinion.
TAYLOR AIKEN: Antoinette Lattouf winning her public showdown with the public broadcaster.
- 7 News, 25 June 2025
Hello, welcome to Media Watch, I'm Linton Besser.
And the sorry tale of Antoinette Lattouf arrived at its entirely predictable yet still shocking conclusion last week with unequivocal findings the public broadcaster had capitulated to a pro-Israel lobbying campaign and unlawfully jettisoned an on-air presenter who had done nothing wrong:
ANTOINETTE LATTOUF: … I shared a Human Rights Watch post because Human Rights Watch found that Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war. Today the court has found that punishing someone for sharing facts about these war crimes is also illegal…
-7.30, ABC, 25 June 2025
The findings of the Federal Court reverberated across the country splashed in the pages of newspapers from coast to coast:
ABC blows $1m in losing Lattouf case
- The Sydney Morning Herald, 26 June 2025
Lattouf's win is a loss for ABC and taxpayers
- The Herald Sun, 26 June 2025
And prompting despair from rusted-on lovers of the ABC:
CRAIG: … I love the ABC and I will defend the ABC to the nth degree, long may it reign. I think what happened to Lattouf and the action the ABC took was appalling.
MICHELLE: … I actually have lost trust in the ABC …
… and I'm really disappointed because, you know, I've listened to you guys for 45 years …
- Melbourne Mornings with Rafael Epstein, ABC Radio Melbourne, 26 June 2025
SALLY SARA: … this is from Jackie in Brisbane. 'What is also concerning is that pro-Israel lobbyists have had access to the ear of ABC upper management, ordinary Australians can only make a complaint online'.
- Radio National Breakfast, 26 June 2025
Much of what occurred in the lead-up to the ABC's 2023 sacking of fill-in radio presenter Antoinette Lattouf has already been established. The coordinated barrage from her first day in the chair of complaints from pro-Israel voices, the pressure from former ABC chair Ita Buttrose grasping for any means by which Lattouf could be dumped, and of course the final straw Lattouf's notorious social media post.
The ABC itself had already reported allegations from Human Rights Watch that Israel was deliberately starving the people of Gaza but Lattouf doing so after a string of social media comments deeply critical of Israel's military campaign that remarkably had not been considered before she was hired, so spooked senior echelons of the organisation it set in train a sequence of events which the Federal Court summarised like this:
The consternation of senior managers of the ABC turned into what can be described as a state of panic.
- Justice Darryl Rangiah, Federal Court of Australia, Lattouf v Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Judgment, 25 June 2025
But what this judgment does do is hold accountable those inside the ABC who played a role in this sorry affair.
At the very top of that list, the director of the division then responsible for ABC Local Radio Chris Oliver-Taylor, at whose feet Justice Darryl Rangiah laid primary blame for Lattouf's removal.
While Oliver-Taylor had insisted he had valid reasons for terminating Lattouf's employment the judge found otherwise:
… I reject Mr Oliver-Taylor's evidence that the reasons given by him for his decision to take Ms Lattouf off air were his actual reasons.
- Justice Darryl Rangiah, Federal Court of Australia, Lattouf v Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Judgment, 25 June 2025
Oliver-Taylor told the court he believed Lattouf had been explicitly instructed to not post anything online concerning the war in Gaza.
The judge again disagreed:
I find that, contrary to his evidence, Mr Oliver-Taylor knew that Ms Lattouf had not been given any direction and had merely been given advice or requested not to post anything about the Israel/Gaza war …
- Justice Darryl Rangiah, Federal Court of Australia, Lattouf v Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Judgment, 25 June 2025
In fact, the ham-fisted sacking of the radio presenter was spurred by news of an imminent article in The Australian about Lattouf's comments on the conflict
and the dread of external criticism:
… Mr Oliver-Taylor sought to mitigate the anticipated deluge of complaints and criticism of the ABC …
… the decision was made to appease the pro-Israel lobbyists who would inevitably escalate their complaints about the ABC employing a presenter they perceived to have anti-Semitic and anti-Israel opinions …
- Justice Darryl Rangiah, Federal Court of Australia, Lattouf v Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Judgment, 25 June 2025
Oliver-Taylor's haste demonstrating:
… extraordinary sensitivity to the prospect of adverse comment by The Australian.
- Justice Darryl Rangiah, Federal Court of Australia, Lattouf v Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Judgment, 25 June 2025
While the judge found Antoinette Lattouf an honest and generally reliable witness and he made similar findings about the most junior of the ABC's managers caught up in the affair, Elizabeth Green, he was less kind about the hierarchy of ABC executives above her, 'unimpressed with Chris Oliver-Taylor's evidence under cross examination' later describing it as 'implausible' and inconsistent with his own notes. 'Implausible' too, the evidence given both by a senior editorial policy advisor Simon Melkman and Ben Latimer, the then head of audio content whose evidence he also described as troubling.
The judge also rejected the evidence of the acting head of the ABC's Capital City Networks Steve Ahern:
The evidence of Mr Latimer, Mr Ahern and Mr Melkman under cross-examination left me with substantial doubts as to the reliability and credibility of their evidence on controversial matters.
- Justice Darryl Rangiah, Federal Court of Australia, Lattouf v Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Judgment, 25 June 2025
The performance in court of the ABC's former chair Ita Buttrose did not escape mention either:
Ms Buttrose's evidence in some of these passages is difficult to understand …
… [and] seems quite unrealistic …
Ms Buttrose's evidence under cross-examination was somewhat theatrical and difficult to follow at times.
- Justice Darryl Rangiah, Federal Court of Australia, Lattouf v Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Judgment, 25 June 2025
Not a single criticism was made of then Managing Director David Anderson's reliability with the judge preferring his version of history over that of his former boss.
While both Anderson and Buttrose were found to have piled pressure on Chris Oliver-Taylor by forwarding him a clutch of lobbyist complaints Anderson in particular played a 'material' role in the affair, not because he failed to intervene in Oliver-Taylor's rash move to sack Lattouf, but by planting in his subordinates mind his view that Lattouf was a potential risk to the organisation and:
… conveying his opinion that Ms Lattouf held anti-Semitic views. Mr Anderson's opinion was then adopted by Mr Oliver-Taylor.
- Justice Darryl Rangiah, Federal Court of Australia, Lattouf v Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Judgment, 25 June 2025
The Federal Court did not find the ABC had been in any way motivated by racism, rather it had terminated Lattouf's employment on the basis of merely holding a political opinion which happened to be on the side of the Palestinian people.
I am satisfied Mr Oliver-Taylor attributed to Ms Lattouf the holding of a political opinion opposing the Israeli military campaign in Gaza, which in his view, made her unsuitable to work as a presenter at the ABC.
- Justice Darryl Rangiah, Federal Court of Australia, Lattouf v Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Judgment, 25 June 2025
While Lattouf's posting of the Human Rights Watch Report to her Instagram account did not ever breach ABC policies, it was, according to the court, ill-advised and inconsiderate to the organisation.
And how much has this cost the ABC? And by that I mean how much has it cost you?
The organisation's new managing director Hugh Marks revealed the mounting legal bill to ABC Melbourne's Raf Epstein:
RAFAEL EPSTEIN: What is the total bill gonna be, do you think? Lawyers' costs, penalties, everything, what are we looking at? …
HUGH MARKS: … it will be millions …
RAFAEL EPSTEIN: Does that mean more than two?
HUGH MARKS: Oh I would suspect so …
… it sounds like there's still more work to do.
- Melbourne Mornings with Rafael Epstein, ABC Radio Melbourne, 26 June 2025
And yet, it could have all been made to go away 12 months ago with Lattouf publicly offering to drop the case in return for an apology a few shifts on radio and a mere fraction of what the ABC would spend defending itself in court:
JOSH BORNSTEIN: The amount of money spent on a case that could have settled for $85,000 is self-evidently ludicrous …
… it has been in aid of nothing other than to discredit the ABC …
- 10 News First, 25 June 2025
So why didn't the ABC settle the case earlier?
Answer: it tried.
But while both sides did agree a final figure, which rose to $150,000, the ABC would not adopt the apology Lattouf sought, which included an admission the broadcaster had unlawfully terminated her employment precisely the outcome the court has now delivered her.
On Wednesday, Marks released a public statement apologising to Antoinette Lattouf and told the ABC's News Channel:
HUGH MARKS: … I regret the way that it was handled and I regret the way that her employment at the ABC was handled.
- ABC News, 25 June 2025
Hugh Marks says the ABC will soon promulgate new social media policies.
But the judgment creates a difficult tension between the ABC's obligations to impartiality and its ability to constrain the political speech of its staff, as employment lawyer Michael Bradley told us:
This is tricky territory for any employer, especially one like the ABC which has public trust obligations of impartiality.
… the proper balance between respecting personal freedom while preserving an organisation's ability to fulfill its mission exists; but that requires far more intelligence and insight than the ABC has recently displayed.
- Email, Michael Bradley, Marque Lawyers, 27 June 2025
There is no shortage of hard lessons in this scandal for the ABC and now that almost every key player has departed the organisation those lessons must fall to the new boss.
Last week, Hugh Marks promised to act as a better firewall between the organisation and future lobbying campaigns:
HUGH MARKS: Our obligation is to ensure we're not overly affected by external forces and that's partly and pretty much a big part of my role …
- ABC News, 25 June 2025
There's no doubt in my mind that Hugh Marks will indeed be tested on this very pledge.
You could set your clock to crises in this place as the ABC strives to achieve an almost impossible nirvana of objectivity and impartiality while still wading into some of society's most divisive issues.
Last week, the ABC was resisting an overhaul of policy and procedure and I think it's right to do so because the Lattouf affair was not evidence of a lack of policy but evidence of a lack of backbone.
For the better part of a decade the public broadcaster has been repeatedly buffeted off-course by members of its board going weak-kneed before the gripes of the persistent and the powerful even when those complaints have very little, if any merit.
Surely … surely, that must end now.