Frank Tenison Brennan SJ AO (born 6 March 1954) is an Australian Jesuit priest, human rights lawyer and academic. He is known for his 1998 involvement in the Wik debate when Paul Keating called him "the meddling priest" and the National Trust classified him as a Living National Treasure. Brennan has a longstanding reputation of advocacy in the areas of law, social justice, refugee protection, Aboriginal reconciliation and human rights activism. Early life and education Brennan is the first born son of Sir Gerard Brennan, a former chief justice of the High Court of Australia and Patricia O'Hara, an anaesthestist. Brennan is a fourth generation Australian. He is of Irish descent on both sides of his family and has German ancestry from his paternal grandmother. Brennan studied at Downlands College in Toowoomba, and at the University of Queensland where he graduated with honours in arts and law. He then studied at the Melbourne College of Divinity, where he graduated, again with honours, in divinity. He was awarded a Master of Laws in 1981 as a result of further study at the University of Melbourne, where he resided at Newman College. Career Brennan's contact and involvement with Aboriginal Australians began early in his priestly ministry. In 1975 he worked in the inner Sydney parish of Redfern with priest activist Fr Ted Kennedy, where he also met and worked with Mum Shirl among others who were founding indigenous Australian legal, health and political initiatives. In 1997, he was rapporteur at the Australian Reconciliation Convention and the following year he was appointed an Ambassador for Reconciliation by the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation. On 10 December 2008 he was appointed as the chairperson to the Australian Government's National Human Rights Consultation Committee. In 2009 this independent committee consulted with the Australian community about the protection and promotion of human rights. On 30 September 2009, it reported its recommendations to the attorney general, the Honourable Robert McClelland MP. Brennan is a professor of law in the Public Policy Institute at the Australian Catholic University, a visiting professorial fellow at the University of New South Wales and served as the founding director of the Uniya Jesuit Social Justice Centre in Sydney from 2001 to 2007. In 2005, he returned to Australia from a fellowship at Boston College. During 2011, Brennan was critical of the refugee policies of the Prime Minister of Australia, Julia Gillard, saying that