Page 27 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 14 February 2006
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It is a good and live issue and debate for us to have. We now have a position in Australia where we have, in the ACT, ever since self-government, adopted and utilised the law of New South Wales in relation to this particular defence. What has now happened in New South Wales, and indeed in every other place in Australia, is that the position has changed. New South Wales no longer utilises, in relation to the law of defamation, a defence of truth and public benefit. It now has a defence of truth alone, as does every other place in Australia, as does the United Kingdom and as do the majority of countries that have adopted the common law position in relation to defamation—and as, through this bill, I propose the ACT does, in the interests of uniformity, in the interests of being a party to model legislation which was developed through the Standing Committee of Attorneys-General, the ministerial council on justice.
I acknowledge the argument, and the strength of the argument, around the need to ensure that the balance is right. There have been attempts to do this for about a century. I would almost guarantee that when Mr Stefaniak, the shadow attorney, was Attorney-General and he attended the Standing Committee of Attorneys-General, on the SCAG agenda was model defamation law. On the agenda when I first attended a Standing Committee of Attorneys-General meeting, as a member of staff of the federal Attorney-General back in 1993, was “defamation law, need for national model bill”.
The history of the development of this is interesting. I would have to check it, but as I recall it Mr Humphries introduced what is as of today the defamation law in the ACT. I believe it was introduced by Mr Humphries but was managed and passed through this place in the hands of Mr Stefaniak as Attorney-General. I’m not sure about Mr Smyth, but I certainly recall Mr Humphries acknowledging that it was through sheer frustration at the lack of progress in the Standing Committee of Attorneys-General on the development of model legislation that he had decided, in frustration, to pursue defamation law reform in the ACT on his own—and, to his credit, that is what he did. At that stage in 1991 I think we could boast and within government could claim that we had the most up-to-date and the most modern defamation law in Australia. That was followed shortly thereafter by New South Wales adopting some of those provisions that were pioneered in the ACT by Mr Humphries and Mr Stefaniak.
That is some of the history of it, but that has now been changed. Once again I acknowledge—and Dr Foskey adverted to this—that it was Mr Ruddock, the Commonwealth Attorney-General, who brought back with some force through the Standing Committee of Attorneys-General the need for Australia to grasp the nettle on uniform defamation law.
I think everybody that has followed the debate around Australia in the last couple of years through this particular process acknowledges the impetus that was given to the issue by Mr Ruddock, at either his first or second SCAG meeting. When he first addressed SCAG, I was at that meeting, and one of the issues that he was intent on driving, as the then new federal Attorney-General, was a national uniform package of defamation law. It has not been said today in this debate, but the commonwealth, the federal Liberal government, supports this package.
Mr Stefaniak: They were railroaded into it by New South Wales.
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