the mid 1990s, Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett backed the Greek position over the Macedonian question in his attempts to shore up local electoral support. At Kennett's insistence, his state government in 1994 issued its own directive that all its departments refer to the language as "Macedonian (Slavonic)" and to Macedonians as "Slav Macedonians". Reasons given for the decision were "to avoid confusion", be consistent with federal naming protocols toward Macedonian Australians and repair relations between Macedonian and Greek communities. It was accepted that it would not impact the way Macedonians self identified themselves. The decision upset Macedonians, as they had to use the terms in deliberations with the government or its institutions related to education and public broadcasting. In mid 1995, the Macedonian Community through its organisation, the Australian Macedonian Human Rights Commission challenged the decision on the basis of the Race Discrimination Act at the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC). The plaintiffs described that the government directive treated Macedonian differently and with an unequal status from other officially recognised languages. The commissioner acknowledged the distress the directive caused, but upheld it due to its intent of decreasing community tensions and not causing discrimination based on ethnic background. After the case was dismissed, the Macedonian community went to the Federal Court. The judge stated that HREOC had made errors in its interpretation of various terms and ruled that discrimination had occurred based on ethnic background. The Federal Court repealed the decision in 1998 and since then the prefix "slavo-" has been dropped, on the basis of racial discrimination. The new state government lost an appeal challenging the decision and then went to the High Court of Australia where it was defeated in 2000 after a ruling was made favouring Macedonians in Australia. As a result of local Greek community pressure, the language name matter was still not addressed in Victoria, causing further distress among parts of the Macedonian community. The issue returned to HREOC and in late December 2000, the commissioner ruled that the directive was not in accordance with the law and that it was discrimination based on ethnic background. The commissioner stated that people from the Macedonian community had experienced distress and humiliation as the Victorian Government had not conducted itself lawfully. The state government said it would remove the language directive and Premier Steve Bracks urged acceptance of the ruling among local communities. In early