In the end, Antoinette Lattouf found out she had won her case against the ABC not from the judge who decided in her favour, but from her junior barrister Philip Boncardo.
Boncardo – and all the lawyers for both Lattouf and the ABC – were handed Justice Darryl Rangiah’s written reasons for the judgment at the start of proceedings on Wednesday, as he started speaking to the packed courtroom.
While Rangiah was still laying out the context and background of the case, the lawyers were frantically riffling through the pages to find out what the judge had decided.
It took Boncardo less than a minute to find the crucial paragraphs. He turned in his chair and nodded to Lattouf smiling. “We won,” he mouthed.
Lattouf looked incredulous. She turned to her husband, sitting in the public gallery behind her, smiled and nodded. Then she turned to hug the two lawyers sitting beside her, bowed her head and sobbed.
Over the next 30 minutes in courtroom 18A of the federal court in Sydney, Rangiah went on to lay out how the ABC had acted unlawfully when it terminated Lattouf, three days into a five-day casual presenting contract on ABC Radio Sydney in December 2023. He ordered the broadcaster to pay Lattouf damages of $70,000 and said it could face further financial penalties, which will be the subject of a future hearing.
Rangiah concluded that despite its arguments to the contrary, the ABC had terminated Lattouf for reasons including that she held a political opinion opposing the Israeli military campaign in Gaza, and in doing so breached the Fair Work Act.
Lattouf was removed from the ABC program after she shared an Instagram post from Human Rights Watch that said Israel had used starvation as a “weapon of war” in Gaza – and Rangiah found that was “bound to be controversial”. He said it was “ill-advised and inconsiderate of her employer”, in light of previous advice she had been given by a manager to refrain from posting anything controversial on social media during the term of her contract – but that taking her off air as a result was unlawful.
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Rangiah also found the ABC contravened its own enterprise agreement by failing to follow its own procedures – by not informing Lattouf of the allegation of misconduct made against her, or allowing her a reasonable opportunity to defend herself.
The decision marked the end of an 18-month-long legal saga which, despite hanging on detailed points of industrial relations laws and editorial policy and protocol, had garnered huge amounts of attention.
But the costs of the case – financial and reputational for the ABC, and emotional and professional for Lattouf – are likely to reverberate for a long time.
Financially, the ABC’s legal fees have run to more than $1m, something that Lattouf’s lawyer Josh Bornstein was scathing about as he addressed media outside the court. Bornstein said the ABC rejected a settlement offer from Lattouf’s team of $85,000 last July.
“The amount of money spent on a case it could’ve settled for $85,000 is self-evidently ludicrous, and has been in aid of nothing except to discredit the ABC,” he said.
Hugh Marks, the ABC’s managing director, who took the role from David Anderson – one of the key figures and witnesses in the Lattouf case – said after the decision that the case was “certainly not a good use of our funds” and reiterated the apology issued by the ABC in the wake of the judgment.
It is, one imagines, convenient for the ABC today that none of the three ABC bosses at the heart of this case are still employed at the broadcaster.
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Ita Buttrose hadalready announcedshe would not seek another term as chair of the broadcaster before the Lattouf drama happened; but the Lattouf case was believed to be a factor in David Andersonresigning a year into his second five-year contract, andChris Oliver-Taylor resigning after his role was substantially downgradedby the new ABC chair, Kim Williams.
The events at the heart of the case happened at a critical political moment – just two months after the October 7 attack in Israel and two months into the bombardment of Gaza – as community tensions in Australia escalated and instances of antisemitic and Islamophobic violence were reported across the country in increasing numbers.
The judge found that Oliver-Taylor had taken the decision to remove Lattouf from her on-air role in part “to appease the pro-Israel lobbyists who would inevitably escalate their complaints about the ABC employing a presenter they perceived to have antisemitic and anti-Israel opinions”.
Rangiah said that complaints to the broadcaster about Lattouf from when she first started broadcasting “were an orchestrated campaign by pro-Israel lobbyists” which “caused great consternation amongst the senior management of the ABC”.
Lattouf’s termination, and the subsequent peek-behind-the-curtains afforded by the court case, went to the heart of a question being asked across Australia: who is allowed to speak on Israel-Gaza, and whether the ABC has the right to dismiss a contractor for expressing an opinion on the matter.
Lattouf has previously had much to say about freedom of the press and the huge emotional toll the case had taken on her.
On the last day of court proceedings in February, an emotional Lattouf addressed the media, composure cracking: “I could not have done this alone. There were days I could barely get out of bed. The public’s unwavering support kept me standing … From the bottom of my heart, I thank you. You gave me strength when I felt that I was drowning from the weight of this.”
But on Wednesday, speaking outside the court, she barely mentioned the case, and didn’t mention freedom of the press or the personal cost of the case. Instead, she ended in the same place this whole saga began – by talking about the suffering of the people of Gaza.
“In December 2023, I shared a Human Rights Watch post,” she said. “This Human Rights Watch post found that Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza. It is now June 2025, and Palestinian children are still being starved. We see their images every day, emaciated, still lethal, scavenging through the rubble of scraps.”