Ethics Committee does not understand ethics

Khalil’s story

Mr Justice Tom Sullivan has ruled this week that the Brisbane City Council’s Ethics Committee misread the ethics provisions of the relevant legislation when it ruled against Greens Councillor for the Gabba Ward, Trina Massey.

The dispute concerned the publication of a story about Khalil Hamdan, a Palestinian Nakba survivor who was six years old in 1948 when his family was forced from their home. The story described Khalil’s childhood experience and his family’s escape from the violence of the Zionist Haganah gang during the Nakba.

Councillor Massey included the story, written by Dr Jamal Nablusi, in material distributed to residents of the Gabba Ward. The Council’s Ethics Committee subsequently ruled against her, and the LNP-dominated Brisbane City Council imposed a $10,000 repayment order over the publication. Contemporary reporting confirms that the dispute centred on the publication of Palestinian academic Jamal Nablusi’s account in Massey’s ward newsletter.

There is something quite ironic about an Ethics Committee failing to understand the ethics provisions it is supposed to administer. I am withholding any further comment about the judgment until it is published.

When I told Khalil about the judgement he wrote back to say:

This is a true story — my story. It also includes the stories of many Palestinian refugees from 1948 and 1967.

The whole world has heard about the Holocaust and the suffering of the Jewish people, but far fewer people have heard about the 1948 Nakba — the mass displacement and ethnic cleansing of around 780,000 Palestinians, both Muslims and Christians.

Thank you, my friend, for writing this article and helping to tell our story.

In solidarity,
Khalil

And then there is Dr Jamal Nablusi. Some media descriptions refer to him as “the rapper” Nabulsi, as though that were the only relevant fact about him. He is also an academic and writer, and he wrote Khalil’s story for publication to the residents of the Gabba Ward.

Another important point is not whether the LNP Mayor or the expensive private consulting firm engaged by council liked the politics of the story. The question is whether the Ethics Committee correctly applied the law.

Now the Queensland Supreme Court has ruled in favour of ‘Khalil’s Story’ … two years after the Greens councillor distributed the community newsletter.

The judgment was delivered by Justice Tom Sullivan quashed the Ethics Committee’s findings and orders, including the requirement that Massey repay $10,000 and apologise. The Court also ordered Brisbane City Council to pay her legal costs

In August 2024 the Gabba ward representative mailed the spring pamphlet to residents at the height of the ongoing Gaza genocide with a two-page spread titled “Khalil’s Story”.

Greens councillor Trina Massey published a newsletter in August 2024 with a two-page spread titled “Khalil’s Story”. Trina Massey had this to say about the actions by council and by this week’s supreme court judgment:

“Today’s outcome is a vindication of my decision to challenge the investigation and the findings of the ethics committee,” Massey said in a statement.

“All of this just for speaking openly about the genocide against Palestinians and the human rights of Palestinians living in my ward.”

Was the backlash from constituents claimed by the Lord Mayor all a beat up? Who was it that said the language penned by the academic Dr Nabulsi was ‘inflammatory and unfair’.

The Lord Mayor claimed that Jewish people in the Gabba ward criticised a timeline in the story that began with Ottoman rule in the Middle Ages and did not include the Holocaust or October 7 attacks.

To understand the Nakba (Catastrophe) we must go back to the period of the British Mandate for Palestine and the consequences of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, through which the British government supported the establishment in Palestine of a “national home for the Jewish people.” but none for 90% of the then population, the Palestinians.

The declaration emerged in the aftermath of European antisemitism and, later, the Holocaust, which created an enormous refugee crisis for European Jews.

But the tragedy was that the consequences of European persecution were imposed upon the Palestinian people, who had not been responsible for that persecution and who were already living in Palestine.

Khalil’s story does not begin in 1948, when he and his family were forcibly driven from Al-Jammasin. Previously they lived in harmony in their village for generations, along with Christians, Muslims, Bedouin, and Jew. Prior to their flight when many people died—a tragedy had become part of the Palestinians enduring history of dispossession. There was the Arab Revolt of 1936 when villages of mandatory Palestine Rose against British rule and did not stop for three years in what became the longest anti-colonial uprising in the history of the British Empire.

Their journey eventually took the Hamdan family to Samaria, living in caves and under olive trees on the way, where they were welcomed by some of the Jewish occupants of Nablus, but shunned by Zionists.

This is a story that deserves to be made into a film.

Khalil’s family history underlines the direct connection between the Palestinian struggle of 1948 and the continuing struggle for a free Palestine today. It is a struggle carried forward by Khalil’s family—not only in Palestine, but here in Australia as well.

His story reminds us that Palestine is not simply history. For Palestinian families, the Nakba is a living memory, passed from one generation to the next, and the struggle for justice and freedom continues to this day.

In December 2025, Brisbane City Council’s ethics committee – comprising three Labor and three LNP councillors – voted unanimously to endorse the recommendations of a review conducted by FairFact Consulting Services.

The ethics committee found Massey breached several behavioural standards.

The report claimed the article was “essentially propaganda and a ‘call to arms’ for pro-Palestinian support that is not objective to the rest of the community.”

As I said, I’ll refrain from commenting even any further until I have read the judgment of Mr Justice Tom Sullivan overuling the ethics committee.

–oOo–

My friend Khalil is a Palestinian arab from Al-Jammasin in Jaffa district. His grandfather grew oranges there before it was taken from him and his town destroyed by the terrorists of 1948. Khalil was 6-years old. He was forced to take shelter under olive trees and in caves with his family pursued by the Israeli militia Hagannah.

A break-a-away militia from the Hagannah called the Irgun led by Menachem Begin blew up the King David Hotel killing half the British military command and a lot of civil servants. So the British left after having had a mandate over Palestine from 1917 till 1947. Prior to the British Mandate was Ottoman rule. However the Ottomans did not occupy the country with military force as did the British after WW I and now the Israelis after WW II.

After the war, in 1948, driven by European guilt about the Holocaust, the United Nations set up the state of Israel. Zionists created the myth of national liberation, a land for a people, in a land without people. In 1977, Israelis made former terrorist, Menachem Begin, their Prime Minister after his party, the Likud, won most seats in the Knesset (parliament).

Ironically the slogan of the Likud party was “From the river to the sea …” The Likud manifesto read: “Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” The slogan was repeated by Menachem Begin during the 1977 election.

In the 19th century, Khalil Hamdan’s ancestors from the Jammasin (Masra’at Hasana) tribe had paid taxes to the Ottoman empire on goats, beehives and water buffaloes.

Now they were driven off their land (the Nakba) by Zionists in the greatest genocide of the 20th century only to be repeated in the 21st century by the new leader of the Likud, Benjamin Netanyahu whose cabinet is openly fascist.

In the 1930s, Jaffa had a communist newspaper called the ‘Arab Labour Weekly‘ and its citizens read Egyptian papers like ‘Rose Al Youssef’. They went to the cinema ‘Al Cinema Wa Al Nas’. There were magazines like Sabah El Keir’ and a satirical one called ‘Al Baaqouqa’ which means the Mess.

The people in Jaffa used to go to the libraries to read short novels and magazines.

This was a very sophisticated society and many families were wealthy.

Khalil’s family was no different. His headmaster wanted their son to become a lawyer but after Al Nakba, he took up an apprenticeship fixing diesel engines, the old type with a flywheel his father used to start the engine. Khalil went to Germany to work and sent money home to his family now strangers in their own land. He came to Australia and became a fitter and turner working for Email in Sydney. They made fridges and white goods. He now makes honey from his beehives which he sells at a local market.

Khalil’s family ended up in Nablus in the old city in a refugee camp. Khalil came to Brisbane and worked in the Ford motor company and sent money back to his family in Nablus.

Ian Curr, 6 September 2026