Why is it that right of centre political parties, when in government, spend so much money funding those who fundamentally disagree with their worldview? They fund the Australian Research Council (ARC) not simply to provide money in the hard sciences and medicine but also in the social sciences and law. Want to make a bet on whether more of that money goes to those in favour of or opposed to such things as, say, bills of rights, letting the boats come in, same-sex marriage, any account of global warming that is insensitive and hostile to Matt Ridley or Bjorn Lomborg-type cost-benefit analyses, and so on? If you have a sneaky feeling that the money, your taxpayer money, goes to those broadly in favour of each of these then go and cash your bet in. Yet the Coalition’s stated position on each of these, at least at the time of writing this column and the cancelling of the Bjorn Lomborg Centre notwithstanding, would be the opposite of what gets most, or all, of the grant money.

And it’s your money that funds this one-sided social science research budget. And it was just as true of the Abbott government as it is now of the Turnbull one.

Same goes for the billion dollar-a-year behemoth that is the ABC. One gets tired of mentioning that not a single conservative is allowed to be a TV presenter or producer or top official there. A few embarrassed ABC types, after scrambling around, point to Amanda Vanstone and Tom Switzer (on radio, note, not on TV) as evidence of the supposedly broad church that is this country’s taxpayer-funded public broadcaster. Well, the latter of those two has a program whose remit avoids domestic issues and the former, Ms Vanstone, strikes me as being someone whose conservatism lies in the Malcolm Fraser wing of the Coalition, and I mean that incarnation of Mr Fraser after he’d long left office when his views had become acceptable in polite inner city coffee haunts as the various public servants waited for their macchiatos to be hand delivered, preferably having been brewed using ‘Fair Trade’ beans that were not shipped through Israel.

Still, if the Coalition’s funding of the ARC (for social sciences grants) and of the ABC (for all their current affairs broadcasting) feels a bit – what’s the word for this sort of state sponsored political activism against one’s own considered political views? – ‘bonkers’, fear not. You see that sort of funding by a supposedly small government-inclined, right-of-centre political party actually looks like money well spent compared to its funding of the drivel that flows from our Human Rights Commission. Remember, the taxpayers of Australia, including the 53 per cent of us who voted for the Abbott-led Coalition two years ago, pay the Commission’s president Gillian Triggs a whopping salary of well over $330,000. And they generously fund her travel to, well, everywhere. And she no doubt is in line for a pension that would make your eyes water – and note, why is it that all the ‘everything on the table’ discussions of taxing more heavily superannuation only ever focus on defined contribution schemes, not the über-generous defined benefit schemes that go to top bureaucrats, judges and politicians? (Actually, I think I just answered my own question.)

You and I also pay for a host of other bureaucrats in this Human Rights Commission, including a Race Relations Commissioner and others. The overall bill for this bureaucracy would make a very tidy saving indeed to a budget massively in deficit. And yet what do we get for our hard-earned taxpayer money?

Well, late last month Professor Triggs gave a speech to the Refugee and Immigration Legal Centre in which she claimed – TRIGGER WARNING: I am not making this up! – ‘Gone are the days when we could say “How dare Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Libya criticise Australia’s human rights record”’. This isn’t just an astonishing claim it’s one that should make you very angry indeed. I spend a lot of my life writing about legal philosophy, including the foundations of rights, and it is near on impossible to guess what Professor Triggs’ understanding of rights must be to suggest, inter alia, that a country such as Saudi Arabia that regularly stones to death women for adultery, that doesn’t let them drive cars, that refuses to allow any places of worship to be built that are not Muslim mosques, that executes gays, that doesn’t know what the word ‘democracy’ means, and the list of horrors goes on and on is now somehow on the same moral plane as Australia. Let me be blunt Ms President of the HRC who is getting a huge salary paid in part from my taxes. Australia is in a different moral solar system, nay galaxy, to Saudi Arabia. And Qatar. And Libya. And if you can’t see that there is something terribly wrong with your whole understanding of what it means to be rights-respecting. And that’s true even if the UN opts to put Saudi Arabia on its Human Rights Council.

We are one of the world’s oldest democracies. Our written constitution is one of world’s oldest too, and in my view one of the best going. We treat women and people from religious minority groups and, well, pretty much everyone, better than they do in scores and scores of countries, not just the three you ill-advisedly mentioned but China, Sudan, Pakistan and Cuba too. That’s why we are a highly desired destination.

We get it that you are not in favour of turning back the boats. People can reasonably disagree on that, though I am strongly in favour. But you didn’t say we were virtually as bad as Saudi Arabia back when hundreds were dying at sea under the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd team. And remind me why it was you delayed your inquiry into children in detention until Mr Abbott came into office? And why was it you and your Commission played virtually dead when the Gillard government mooted a free speech enervating bureaucracy that would oversee the Press?

Meanwhile, why is it that your Race Relations Commissioner, with clear ties to Labor before his appointment, felt it was his job to argue against any amendment to our awful 18C hate speech laws?

Here’s the thing. To make the sort of claim Professor Triggs did you implicitly have to see rights in such absolutist terms that any perceived breach, however comparatively small and contestable, counts the same as any other breach, however big and obvious. It probably also helps if you see yourself as especially morally perspicacious – that after four billion years of life you, Ms Triggs, are somehow the pinnacle of moral evolution and that your moral antennae vibrate at some Godly-tuned frequency. And that’s plain out balderdash. I do not want a solitary dollar of my taxes to continue to go to this outfit we call our Human Rights Commission. Its president is an embarrassment.