Page 3210 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 11 September 1991
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MR CONNOLLY (Attorney-General, Minister for Housing and Community Services and Minister for Urban Services) (3.53), in reply: Mr Speaker, my response will be somewhat brief. I was just looking in the Hansard for the reference because I made a ministerial statement on defamation in the last sitting week, which is yet to be printed in the hard copy of Hansard.
In that statement I informed the house that the ACT Labor Government had taken the view that it wanted to move with the eastern States' reform proposal in the direction of uniformity. I mentioned at the time, because the committee report had just been published, that we were pleased to see that the committee, by and large, was supportive of that approach, rather than the approach which appeared to be the view of the former Government, that is, that the ACT could in some way go it alone, in rather adventurous reforms of the law of defamation, to set up a supposedly ideal system in this Territory.
I said at the time that, in media terms, the Territory was very much an island in New South Wales. The media in Australia tends to be nationally networked. The electronic media, certainly, is nationally networked; the print media is increasingly falling into smaller and smaller ownership concentrations - an issue which the Australian Labor Party views with some concern, of course. It means that the print and electronic media flow freely across State borders, publications tend to move across State borders, and, if you do not have uniformity in this question of defamation, it massively adds to the cost and complexity of litigation.
As Mr Stefaniak indicated in his remarks this afternoon, we are well aware that forum shopping is a problem in defamation law reform. The ACT is seen by many as an attractive forum in which to conduct plaintiffs' actions because juries are not used in this Territory. It is seen by some plaintiffs to be not a bad move to run a case in the absence of the sometimes sceptical views of a jury.
We believe as a Government that that move to uniformity must be supported. It is a real window of opportunity when across a political boundary there is strong support for uniform laws between the New South Wales Liberal Government and the Queensland and Victorian Labor governments. Defamation law reform and uniformity have been talked about and written about in various law journals and many essays on the subject have been written at law schools. Since the mid-1970s, when the Australian Law Reform Commission published its report on defamation, much has been said but little has been done to achieve uniformity. There is a real opportunity now for that uniformity to be achieved.
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