Page 16 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 14 February 2006
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While the cap on damages of $250,000 in this bill is still high enough to effectively discourage most ordinary people from speaking out, it is obviously inadequate in high profile or hard fought cases like Mr Marsden’s. To a media magnate $250,000 is very small bickies indeed and is unlikely to discourage behaviour when it results in increased sales of newspapers or more advertising revenue to go with the television version of shock jock media. Perhaps awards for defamation, like many other civil penalties, should be means tested.
Not-for-profit corporations will be able to sue. While I support this provision, I just want to put a caveat on that, because it does carry some danger. Front groups set up by industry, such as Timber Communities Australia, which is in fact entirely financed and possibly humanly resourced by the National Association for Forest Industries and which replaced the Forest Protection Society after people became aware that it was also a front for NAFI, will still be able to sue for defamation under these laws. These groups are, in fact, fronts for the woodchipping part of the timber industry. If we look into their accounts it would be very obvious that they are funded by that industry. They are not community organisations in the spirit that we know them, which rise from the bottom. They are top down organisations and they have an agenda that fully supports industry. It is to be expected that corporations will continue to use these ostensibly community-based groups to wage their dirty tricks campaign. Again, my anti-SLAPP bill will help protect against these developments.
Too often we see a feeble apology, or even a heartfelt apology or correction, in a small paragraph embedded deep within a newspaper or, at best, put in on page 2, which, as everyone knows, fewer people read, which purports to rectify the mischief caused by a falsehood that may have been splashed across the front page in large bold print. I am curious as to why the attorneys-general rejected the federal government’s proposal for corrections orders. I would have thought that this would be a welcome adjunct to monetary damages. It might not be easy to find, but at least it is there and goes part way to recompense the loss of reputation.
There is a mechanism in this bill whereby the defendant can offer to make amends. They must offer to publish a correction in a suitably prominent place, pay the plaintiff’s expenses, publish an apology, pay compensation, et cetera. While I note concerns that this may lead to poorer plaintiffs being pressured to reach unsatisfactory settlements, on balance, as I said earlier, I think this is a positive development that does not go far enough. I will be supporting this bill. I am looking forward to the debate on Mr Stefaniak’s amendments because I am considering supporting one of those as well.
MR STANHOPE (Ginninderra—Chief Minister, Attorney-General, Minister for the Environment and Minister for Arts, Heritage and Indigenous Affairs) (11.31), in reply: I thank members for their contributions to the debate. I note some of the reservations that have been expressed in the debate, and of course they go very much to the heart of defamation law and the great tussle between protection of reputation and right to privacy and, of course, freedom of speech—or purported freedom of speech. This is always at the heart of any discussion around defamation or libel or the way in which the common law has developed over the centuries to protect those very disparate, and at times seemingly opposite, rights: the right to freedom of expression, the fundamental right in a free democratic society, and the countervailing right to privacy, the right to be able to
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