Police Minister Felix Ellis has refused to apologise for his personal conduct toward a journalist, instead using question time to detail the violent attack on a firearms owner in what the Greens characterised as a ‘weaponised’ deflection.
The Greens pressed Ellis multiple times in parliament on Wednesday to say sorry for his handling of an interaction with a journalist who asked about the link between owning multiple firearms and being a target for theft.
Ellis had accused the journalist of victim blaming and then shared the exchange on his social media, drawing criticism from ABC program Media Watch and prompting media union MEAA to write to the Premier seeking an apology.
Rather than address his own conduct, Ellis spent much of his response detailing the attack on firearms owner Grant Whelan.
“I don’t know if the member has ever met someone who’s been tied up with cable ties and dragged along the floor and had, all of the skin on both arms ripped and burned off them,” he said.
Greens MP Tabatha Badger accused Ellis of weaponising a crime to avoid accountability.
“We’ve just heard you weaponise horrific and harrowing events of a Tasmanian known to some in this chamber to deflect from your own behaviour,” she said.
Badger gave Ellis what she described as a “final chance” to apologise directly to the journalist, but he again declined.
“Whether he owns 1 or 100 firearms, the question that we should ask is, what can we do to support him?” he said.
At a press conference last month held three days after the original question was asked, Ellis addressed the journalist in question – saying he hoped “things are going okay”.
However, Ellis stopped short of apologising for his response to the journalist’s question, instead only covering the government media office’s failure to moderate abusive comments on Ellis’ Facebook and Instagram pages.
“I have a huge amount of respect for you personally and I think fair comment for both of us,” he said.
“But I think more broadly, this is a moderation issue and we could have done more when it comes to moderating the comments and in good faith when you contacted us about that we took those down.”
Ellis re-iterated those comments in Parliament on Wednesday.
“We should have done more in terms of moderation and we absolutely accept that,” Ellis said in the chamber.
“I know that there are challenges in the modern world moderating those sort of comments.”
