Ita Buttrose, who delivered a combative performance in court on Tuesday, served a five-year term as ABC chair that concluded in March last year.
Ita Buttrose leaving the Federal Court in Sydney on Tuesday.Credit: James Brickwood
During her evidence on Tuesday afternoon, Buttrose insisted she had “nothing to do” with Lattouf’s abrupt exit from the airwaves.
Lattouf’s barrister, Philip Boncardo, referred to an email Buttrose sent ABC managing director David Anderson on December 20, 2023, after Lattouf was removed as the fill-in presenter of Sydney Mornings after three days of a planned five-day stint.
The court heard Buttrose forwarded Anderson an email from a listener thanking the ABC for taking Lattouf off-air. She wrote: “It’s nice to get congratulatory emails.”
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“Well, it is,” she said in court. “They’re few and far between.”
Boncardo put to Buttrose: “You were happy with the outcome that my client had been fired, weren’t you?”
“No one’s ever happy with a dismissal of anyone. I don’t know why you think that. It’s the worst thing that can happen to anybody. I’m not happy, and I wasn’t happy,” Buttrose said.
“I didn’t wish her to be removed, I didn’t put pressure on anybody, it’s a fantasy of your own imagination. I had nothing to do with her dismissal.”
Boncardo put to Buttrose that “from the point you commenced receiving complaints about Ms Lattouf on the 18th of December that you wanted her to be fired”.
“No,” the former ABC chair replied.
She denied that her emails to Anderson on December 19 were making clear that this was her position.
“You were taking it upon yourself personally to email Mr [Chris] Oliver-Taylor [the ABC’s chief content officer] to make clear to him that, so far as you were concerned, the situation was not an acceptable one,” Boncardo pressed.
“No, that’s not true, and I didn’t personally write to Chris Oliver-Taylor. I wrote to Chris Oliver-Taylor with the complaints at the instruction of the managing director, David Anderson,” Buttrose said. Anderson’s evidence diverges on this point.
She denied she wanted Lattouf fired, that she sought to use her position as chair to prevail upon Anderson and Oliver-Taylor to replace her, or that she wanted her fired because of her views on Israel’s war on Gaza, because she was a pro-Palestinian activist and because she supported the human rights of Palestinians.
“The evidence you have given in respect to those denials is untrue,” Boncardo put to Buttrose.
“I have told the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” she said.
